How worried is the government?

I think if you look at the way the government's responded to this crisis so far, it's pretty clear that if they can, they're not going to let petrol prices go to the moon, above $3 a liter, for example.

I'd say if there was another emergency situation like we had at the start of the crisis, they wouldn't be shy to step back in with another cut to the excise, even if it's gonna cost billions of dollars to the budget.

I think the bigger risk at this point, though, is not so much at the bowser, but in the broader economy.

You know, the inflationary impacts are already filtering through.

Oil is in everything.

It's in all these products that we import.

I mean, do we really start to boost efforts in, for example, sustainable aviation fuel? Do we do renewable diesel? All sorts of those alternative fuels that we really haven't spent much effort on so far, that could really take off now.

And between agitators from outside politics and insiders trying to take advantage of it, it's really become quite unstoppable.

Partly what's interesting about this story is kind of what it says about the way Labor does policy reform.

Uh, we've seen a bit of this with the capital gains tax issue.

They tend not to want to advocate for it directly, you know, well before they actually announce the policy.

They'd rather fly a kite through proxies and other groups, uh, and see how it plays out in the press, you know? And so by giving this idea oxygen, you know, first through the ACTU, some of these stories about the modeling, you know, they really did give it a big push and raise expectations quite high.

They could see that this idea of a gas tax clearly had pretty significant support in the community.

You know, Labor tend to poll everything, like they know where voters' heads are at.

And it's pretty utopian to think if we only got 10 billion out of the gas companies, everything would be fixed, but I think it does speak to the emotion driving this and, and that emotion is very hard to ignore.