While people are unnecessarily and absurdly fighting over toilet paper, and there are hints of medication and other shortages to come because of the coronavirus, the one big shortage that has been here for a long time - thanks to government incompetence and lack of interest - is fuel.

Australia has only THREE WEEKS of fuel oil in storage. One day …...

Yes, I agree. I have been warning family and friends about this for a couple of weeks now. We can survive without a lot of things, but not without electricity.
My family are okay, everyone would go back and live on their traditional outstations and live off the land. They might suffer a lot and feel miserable but they would survive.
Unfortunately this option is not available to the vast majority and millions would die.
Past governments have been totally remiss in allowing this outcome to happen.

Unfortunately the Government/media focus and expenditure has been on the fake gw scare. Signing up to idiotic UN agreements and being lectured to by 16 year old self entitled brats. Meanwhile a real issue that you mention has been overlooked. Trump looks better and better by the minute while our own Government cowards who fail to stand up for truth and facts. There are a couple of exceptions.

Yes indeed ttbn. Everyone likes to think that peak oil did not happen.
Actually what did happen was peak "Crude Oil", to define it accurately.
When it happened in 2005 the oil companies & others went scraping around
in their bottom draws and pulled out fracking.
It was successful up to a point, it did produce more oil but at a cost.
Plenty of fracking companies going bust or selling up

The other side of the problem is that the major oil companies are having
a hard time with search and development costs.
As a result they are considering their future. Barrel prices are low due to low demand.
There are no more easy oil fields to find so they are considering how
to exit the oil industry. They have been repeating those statements and
even starting to install electric car chargers in their service stations.

NSW requires about two oil tankers to enter Sydney ports EVERY day.
Australia might have three weeks supply but that includes what is
already in the tanks of our cars so I suspect we have one week.
Take a lesson from the toilet roll panic and I would say we would have
two or three hours from the moment it becomes known.

Even governments are not taking this problem seriously.

According to Alan Kola, the reason that oil prices have slumped recently is on account of the fact that there is a price war between the Saudis and the Russkies.

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Thereafter, Australia has significant fuel reserves.

The adf alone has hundreds if not thousands of secret stashes all around the country. All you gotta do is get out there with your jerry can and tap in hhahaha

What Alan Kola thinks will be irrelevant if we are faced with an attack or if our supplies are cut off in the midst of armed conflict. It's a matter of our security, not whether or not boofheads can continue operating their over sized, over priced SUV compensation for small dicks.

Note that our Prime Minister has taken up the boogeyman tactics of the press and the Marxists, putting the frighteners on us - the virus's effects could be worse than those of the GFC, he is trumpeting today. And he is going to rush in now, Rudd-like, with 'packages' to help everyone and everything. And, just like Rudd, he will probably stuff it up. It's just a pity that he will not come out of hiding and do something about our parlous fuel situation, our inability to defend ourselves, mass immigration of useless people, laughable submarines, and all of the other areas where he is little different from Rudd, Turnbull and the Left side of politics in general.

I don't know that pensioners would generally agree with your assertion that Rudd stuffed it up as it led to a not insignificant and arguably well overdue rise in the pension.

Some of those that I knew in Indo at the time of the GFC 10 years or so ago suddenly found themselves seriously short changed when the dollar lost nearly a third of its value temporarily against the rupiah and had to start regulating their food budgets.

Anyhow's, short version of the story is the dollar recovered and KRudd pumped up the base rate of the pension and, I may be mistaken, but also indexed the pension at that time to "mean male wages" (but don't quote me on that one as it may have already been the case - perhaps someone else knows)

But, suffice to say ttbn everyone was pretty happy with KRuddy once the dust settled, and understandably so.

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The thing is this in Aust, if you have an affordable housing solution (say no more than $200 per fortnight) and if you are frugal meaning you largely cook for yourself, you can be a motorist and still save $250 - $300 per fortnight on the pension.

How subsidies are distributed varies by state, but in Perth WA for example, PBS medication, GP and other bulk billed medical services, largely free dentistry, a free return trip to the bush on the bus (just to mention a few) equates to a situation where in many ways, you are far better off than so-called members of the working poor class.

However, if you don't have an affordable housing solution then you're #%@!'ed

And whilst a not insignificant portion of the subsidies went overseas, that which stayed in Aust was largely beneficial as pensioners spent their extra directly into the local economy.

After all, it is not pensioners who are running around the world p!ssing tax payers money up against the wall now is it?

As for laughable submarines I'd say a couple of things.

The first one is, the biggest, most confident smiles you can see on politicians' faces is when they are talking about defence capability matters.

The reason for this is that it is one of the few things most of them can agree that it is appropriate to lie about.

That's another way of saying that australia has "teeth," have no doubt.

The second thing is that they love to hide things. So, when considering the "laughable subs" this does in part go to maintain the illusion that australia is relatively weak militarily and highly dependent on its allies.

This is not so bad, as arguably if it were known to be otherwise, it could have the effect of generating a regional arms race, which if nothing else, would cause many of the world's impoverished to suffer more.

As for the subs themselves, big nuke subs are very noisy. And when it comes to sneaky, stealthy business, the aust navy has long made sport of sneaking around unbeknownst to their larger cousins, a tactic also adopted by the mainland chinese, who are alleged to have well in excess of 5000 fighter planes and then some.

So, do not presume that everything is as it appears.

Australia should dramatically decrease its oil used to ward off a potential crisis by tightening fuel-efficiency standards, introducing electric vehicle targets and increasing public transport use, the Australia Institute has warned. If we install two or more solar panels together and connect them with solar inverter, solar battery than it become a solar power system that can be used in houses, companies, schools, industries etc. Solar panel is the main part of solar system and all types of solar system contains same type of solar panel.

Australia is eyeing off the United States' tightly guarded fuel reserve as it seeks to overcome having less than a third of the stocks it should. Australia is high electricity generator with the help of solar panel system which generate the electricity through the sun rays.

Australia is eyeing off the United States' tightly guarded fuel reserve as it seeks to overcome having less than a third of the stocks it should.