Should we be throwing the kitchen sink at the fuel crisis like Australia?
Wednesday, 15 April 2026
Henry Cooke is deputy political editor at The Post. He writes a column every Wednesday.
OPINION: Anthony Albanese is doing a lot.
The Australian prime minister seems worried enough about fuel stocks to burn a lot of it. He’s just back from Singapore and already planning a trip to Malaysia and Brunei. These three countries provide a significant chunk of Australia’s fuel imports.
But it’s not just the jetsetting. Australia’s export credit agency has underwritten extra fuel purchases from private providers on the spot market - giving it some control over where that fuel goes. It has halved the excise tax on fuel and removed the heavy vehicle road user charge. The states have taken that cut further, using the projected GST uplift from higher fuel prices to lower the excise another 7c or so (NZD).
Australia and New Zealand both have a four-step national fuel plan - but unlike New Zealand, Australia is on level two, not level one. Both countries have some kind of fuel conservation advertising campaign, but being at level 2 means Australia’s is more focused on encouraging less driving.
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Christopher Luxon is a busy man. But he is not currently throwing the kitchen sink at the issue quite as hard as his counterpart across the Tasman is.
New Zealand has not cut fuel taxes. It is in talks to obtain some fuel commercially but we don’t know how or when. Mileage rates for home support workers have been raised and some money spent on increasing diesel storage.
Luxon has travelled overseas since the crisis began but not to our major fuel supplying nations - although he notes whenever this comes up that Australia is “playing catch up”, as New Zealand already had a fuel security deal with Singapore. Public transport has had no increased subsidy, although talks are ongoing to prevent fares rising.
The Government here has provided a substantial support package to a narrow group of around 143,000 working families, worth $50 a week.
It is natural to wonder whether New Zealand could learn something from our cousins across the ditch.
Of course, we come to this crisis differently. Australia is a substantially richer country that entered this crisis with an economy growing roughly twice as fast. Its federal government has substantially lower debt as a proportion of the economy - although much spending is controlled by states in Australia. It is also simply bigger, and a substantial net exporter of energy through coal and gas.
This gives Australia far more options, both fiscally and diplomatically. As the source of about one fifth of the world's LNG, it has a big stick in its back pocket — one that will likely make it more money in the near term as commodity prices rise. It can afford to throw money at consumers to cushion the blow from price spikes.
Nothing is necessarily stopping New Zealand doing the same, but given our debt position it would be harder to justify - particularly as fuel tax cuts are a fairly unwise idea in the first place, with most of the gains going to the richest people, and demand subsidised for a commodity you are trying to conserve.
Australia’s expensive fuel tax cuts are set to expire after three months, meaning the government is quite reliant on the crisis being resolved by then. Our last government ran into this exact problem when it cut fuel taxes in response to Ukraine. New Zealand’s support package, by contrast, is budgeted to run for a year or until 91 grade petrol drops below $3 a litre.
In other words, Nicola Willis is retaining more options in case things get worse. She is leaving some gas in the tank. This means for anyone not in one of those 143,000 families - beneficiaries, the childless, or just a diesel-reliant business - the Government is not looking to shield you right now. Ministers may acknowledge that this crisis is not the fault of these groups but fundamentally they do not yet see the need to intervene to protect you from price spikes. Indeed, many in the Government agree that high prices are a useful tool in times of scarcity - doing the work of sorting the most fuel-dependent from the least.
Australian voters are not so forgiving of hard choices being forced upon them. As one of the richest countries in the world this makes a lot of sense.
Our differing economic fortunes contribute to a wider difference in how our two governments view the crisis, but real ideology plays a part too.
Albanese appears scared of being seen to do too little. His government is throwing everything at the wall, confident that at least some of it will stick, and no Australian will be able to say that the government is “ignoring” the crisis. As a leftish leader he sees it as right that the government intervene heavily in crises.
Luxon seems scared of doing too much. His government has been at pains to distance this crisis from Covid-19, to discourage working from home as a response, or indeed any kind of fuel reduction measures - seemingly terrified of how an encouragement to move around less might hurt the fragile economy. This is somewhat more coherent than Australia asking people to use less fuel while also making it cheaper, but it leaves a lot of people around the country wondering if our government is really doing anything to soften the blow.
The underlying logic of a more restrained response makes sense. Post-Covid Kiwis are probably warier of the government trying to solve every problem for them. But we are not a nation afraid of intervention when a crisis calls for it - and we’re not above checking how the other side of the Tasman is managing, and finding our own leaders wanting. We’re not quite there yet. But if the crunch comes and Albanese’s chequebook and flight log gets him something we can’t, we could well be.