There are decisions a government announces with fanfare, and decisions it lets slip through in silence. The end of fuel excise relief, Jeremy Cordeaux argued on this week’s Court of Public Opinion, was firmly the second kind — and the silence that followed it told him everything.
Relief Withdrawn, Excise Raised
The discount motorists had been feeling at the bowser is finished. In its place, Jeremy noted, the excise has been pushed back up, with an indexed increase stacked on top. At the precise moment families are wrestling with the cost of living, a piece of genuine relief was pulled away and then loaded further.
He’d watched the weekend vox pops, ordinary people shrugging that they simply have to cop it. That resignation, he said, is exactly what a government banks on — quiet acceptance instead of hard questions.
The Question Left Hanging
What genuinely angered Jeremy was the press. One obvious question was begging to be asked of the Treasurer: why strip away relief that matters so much to households fighting your own cost-of-living increases? Not a single journalist, in his account, put it to him.
To Jeremy, that failure is its own scandal. When a government withdraws help and lifts a charge in one move, the least the public deserves is someone with a microphone demanding an explanation. Instead, the decision sailed by unexamined.
Petrol Touches Everything
The reason Jeremy won’t let fuel go is that its price never stays at the pump. Petrol, like electricity, is a huge multiplier — and so is diesel. Goods move around this country on trucks, he reminded listeners, and when fuel costs more, so does everything those trucks carry.
A rise at the bowser today, in other words, becomes a rise at the checkout tomorrow. That, he warned, is the jump now heading our way, rippling out into the price of the entire weekly shop.
Sixty-Two Cents Of Comfort
Jeremy pre-empted the government’s defence — that it has delivered tax cuts. His reply was scathing. Sixty-two cents a day, he said. What can anyone actually do with that? Set beside a fuel decision that lifts the cost of living across the board, a saving that small is, to him, an insult wearing the costume of relief.
Whose Side Are They On?
For Jeremy, the whole episode revealed a priority. A government that genuinely cared about household budgets would have kept the fuel discount in place. Removing it, he argued, shows a government more interested in its own revenue than in the people straining to keep up — an open goal, he added, for any opposition sharp enough to name it.
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Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
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