Albanese and Report 117
by David Archibald
23 March 2026
On our current trajectory, we will be battling for survival on a daily basis soon enough and won’t have time to figure out the history of how we got into our predicament. Our current minister for fuel matters, Bowen, is counting tankers that are still on their way to Australia. We should never be in that position. So, while there is still food on the supermarket shelves, this is an explanation of how we got here, starting with an extract from this article back in 2020:
I was asked a few days ago why there isn’t more concern about Australia’s dire fuel stock position. Australia’s biggest existential threat in the next few years is China’s war of choice. And we are only making it worse for ourselves by not even having the fuel stock levels that we are required to hold as a signatory to the International Energy Agency agreement.
We have about 20 days of consumption of things like diesel and petrol while the agreement we signed requires us to hold at least 90 days of stocks. In reality we should hold at least 200 days of stocks. The more we hold, the more soundly we will sleep.
As a practical matter, upon hearing about the outbreak of war, head down to the service station and fill up every container you own. It is likely to be the last fuel you will see for a while. The toilet paper scramble of the Wuhan virus was a picnic compared to what is coming.
Wars are started over access to fuel — witness Japan’s entry into WW2 after Roosevelt’s oil embargo. Campaigns are structured around capturing oilfields — Germany’s WW2 thrust to Romania and then to the Caspian Sea region. And the outcomes of many battles in the 20th and 21st centuries have been determined by which side ran out of fuel first. So, fuel is important.
Talk about the importance of fuel though is inconvenient to the globalist narrative on the evil that is carbon. The globalists have been promoting carbon as the No.1 hate object on the planet. Suggesting that having more of a carbon-based fuel is necessary causes cognitive dissonance for some.
Australia’s political leaders have not always been such fools when it comes to liquid fuel security. In 2005, Kim Beazley, while Leader of the Federal Labor Opposition, asked, in an address to the Australian Institute of Company Directors,
As Australians queue for petrol at around $4.00, $5.00 potentially up to $10.00 a litre further down the track, the question will be: how did our government not see the writing on the wall?
Anthony Albanese provides a couple of examples of not seeing the writing. He was minister for transport in 2009, when the department’s research arm was about to release Report 117, which is 474 pages on the subject of long-term oil supply. Albanese pulled the report just prior to printing. Another report on aircraft was relabelled as No 117, to bury the crime. At the time Gillard was bringing in her carbon tax, so a report saying that the real problem was the opposite would not have helped her.
Nigh on a decade has passed since then and Labor scraped the bottom of the barrel to make Anthony Albanese its leader. But Australia is still a major coal exporter, and coal mining unions don’t like having their members’ jobs threatened. Albanese’s way of coping is ‘good coal, bad coal’. Thermal coal is bad because it adds to global warming, while coking coal is good because it is used in making steel for wind turbines. This is what Mr Albanese says he believes. Of course, if he actually believes that then he is an idiot. If he doesn’t believe it then he is lying (his default position on any subject).
Australia’s standard of living is being sacrificed on the altar of global warming through higher power prices for renewable energy. It may end up that the whole country will be sacrificed on that altar through lack of fuel stocks in the coming conflict.
What did we miss out on, when denied the 474 pages of Report 117? This is summarised by this figure from page xxix:
That figure, made in 2009, is of world oil production from 1870 with a projection to 2100. It has world oil production falling out of bed right about now. As a civilisation, starting in 2009, we would have had to scramble hard to replace oil in the economy while maintaining our standard of living. Starting that process 20 years later will make the process harder. That is the consequence of Albanese’s judgement.
What about the alternative to Albanese, the current Leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor? Mr Taylor was Minister for Energy from 28th August, 2018 to 23rd May, 2022. He talked a big game on energy security, but in the end he did the opposite. Being in contempt of its own voter base, the Morrison regime bought some oil to be a strategic reserve but didn’t tell the Australian public the quantum involved. It was a token effort to shut up its supporters.
To make things worse, it was stored in the salt caverns of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Louisiana. We didn’t find out how much was involved until later, after it had been sold. In one of his last acts as Energy Minister, Angus Taylor sold the whole of our strategic oil reserve of 1.7 million barrels in March, 2022. That amount of oil would have lasted us 1.7 days, if it ever made it to Australia.
By their fruits you shall know them — Albanese and Taylor are worse than useless on energy security. They have been deceptive and in contempt of the Australian public. We need someone else to lead us.
How much do we need to spend to have some security? In 2023, the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane awarded a contract to design and build a new 31 meter diameter, 20 meter high jet fuel storage tank for $9.3 million. That works out to $103 per barrel of storage capacity, which is $0.65 per litre. A good start, proportional to Japan’s 470 million barrels, would be a strategic reserve of 100 million barrels. The tankage for that would cost $10.3 billion. To fill it at the current Brent price of US$112.82 per barrel would be a further $16.1 billion. The total of $26.4 billion is significantly less than what we are currently spending each year on the NDIS. No more need be said about affordability — just reallocate from the NDIS. We need to start a bidding war amongst the political parties about the size of the fuel stock they promise to build.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare