Roger Cook's Emergency Powers Move Is Actually the Right Call
Been following the fuel situation pretty closely this week, and there’s a lot to unpack. Roger Cook invoking emergency powers in WA under the Fuel, Energy and Power Resources Act 1972 has got people either cheering or crying government overreach — and honestly, I think a lot of the critics are missing the point entirely.
Let’s be clear about what actually happened here. This wasn’t some dramatic state of emergency like we saw during COVID. Cook used specific legislative powers to force fuel companies to disclose how much fuel they actually have and where it’s stored. That’s it. The reason? Companies were apparently hiding behind “supply contract confidentiality” clauses to avoid sharing that information. Which means Gina Rinehart’s operations, BHP, Rio, Twiggy’s empire — they potentially have millions of litres sitting at their mine sites while the rest of WA is sweating about supplies. The audacity is genuinely breathtaking.
Someone in an online discussion summed it up well: how can you ask ordinary people to make sacrifices and ration their fuel use when the big end of town won’t even tell the government what they’ve got stockpiled? It completely undermines any sense of social cohesion. And they’re right. This isn’t government overreach — this is the government doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The broader context here is important too. We’re in the middle of a genuine global oil supply crisis, largely thanks to the chaos being unleashed from Washington right now. Trump’s aggression toward Iran, the resulting instability in the Middle East, disrupted shipping lanes — this is a mess that was, frankly, somewhat predictable given the trajectory of US foreign policy over the past few years. Australia’s vulnerability has been talked about for two decades. We have minimal domestic refining capacity, our fuel reserves are chronically thin by international standards, and we lost our merchant marine fleet — a decision that Scott Morrison’s government made and which is looking increasingly short-sighted right now.
On Albo’s national address — I get the frustration, I really do. When you get a national broadcast address, you’re conditioned to expect something big. Instead it was essentially “stay calm, don’t hoard, maybe catch the bus.” Anticlimactic doesn’t begin to cover it. But I also understand the logic of not wanting to trigger a panic-buying spiral worse than what we already saw. The government has actually done things — halved fuel excise, reduced heavy vehicle charges, replaced cancelled shipments, negotiated with Singapore, worked to get tankers heading our way. None of that is nothing. The communication around it has just been pretty woeful.
What genuinely frustrates me though is the WFH conversation. We went through COVID. We know it works. We know it cuts commuting, reduces fuel demand, saves workers money, and doesn’t actually destroy productivity — the data is in. The fact that Albo seemingly doesn’t want to push a firmer WFH directive because he doesn’t want to upset business lobbies is exactly the kind of triangulating, wet-lettuce politics that drives me up the wall. Just do it. Make it a three-month Fair Work directive. It’s an easy win and it takes real pressure off fuel demand almost immediately.
The deeper issue this whole crisis is exposing — and has been exposing for a while — is how dangerously exposed Australia is as a nation that exports enormous amounts of raw resources but has hollowed out its own industrial and energy self-sufficiency. We sell coal and LNG to the world but can barely refine our own fuel. We’re the lucky country that somehow keeps finding new ways to be unlucky with our own resources. If this isn’t the wake-up call that finally pushes us toward a more complex, resilient economy with genuine energy sovereignty, I genuinely don’t know what will be.
Roger Cook’s move was smart, pragmatic, and frankly overdue. The rest of the country should be watching closely — because this crisis isn’t going away anytime soon, and the states and federal government are going to need every tool available to manage what comes next.