Jeremy Cordeaux has a phrase he reaches for whenever a government fails to think ahead: unintended consequences. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, he found a costly new one, up to $60,000 a day paid to fuel tankers parked off the coast, because nobody worked out where to put the fuel once it arrived.
Good Idea, Half Executed
Jeremy was fair about the starting point. The government moved quickly to source new and greater supplies of fuel, diesel, petroleum and jet fuel, as a backstop for the country’s energy security. Good thinking, he allowed. Nothing wrong with wanting a buffer.
The trouble was everything after. Having secured the fuel, the government appears not to have thought through the obvious question: when it arrives, where do you put it? Where do you store it? Great to have more fuel, Jeremy said, but only if you have somewhere to keep it.
Tankers Parked At Sea
The result is that the ships have arrived and are, in effect, parked off the east coast of Australia, unable to unload because the storage is not there. And parked tankers are not free.
Jeremy put the cost at $40,000 to $60,000 a day per vessel, with twenty or thirty huge tankers sitting idle. At $60,000 a day across a fleet that size, the bill climbs at frightening speed, money spent not on fuel, not on storage, but simply on leaving ships floating offshore. Our current storage system, he observed drily, is apparently the ocean.
Only Public Money
What sharpened Jeremy’s anger was the attitude he detects behind such waste. Oh well, he said, mimicking the shrug, it’s only money. It’s only public money. Sort of not real money, is it?
That, for Jeremy, is precisely the mindset that produces blunders like this. When those spending the money treat it as somehow less real than their own, the discipline that would catch an obvious problem, like having nowhere to store the fuel you just bought, simply vanishes.
They Do Not Think Ahead
For Jeremy, the anchored tankers are a small, vivid symbol of a much larger failing. I don’t think these guys are very bright, he said bluntly. The issue is not the decision to build a fuel reserve, which was sensible, but the failure to plan the next, entirely predictable step.
It is the same pattern he has traced across NDIS costs, the tobacco excise and energy policy: a government that acts without following the logic to its conclusion, and leaves the public to pay for the gap. Twenty or thirty tankers at $60,000 a day, he suggested, is what happens when nobody stops to think it through.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
