Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@DrewPavlou
Australia is on track to run out of diesel, petrol and jet fuel in 30 days. If things don't change soon the Australian government will be forced to implement a national emergency lockdown within weeks.
In practice this would look like:
- Priority allocation to emergency services, defence, hospitals, police
- Bans on recreational driving and non-essential vehicle use
- Suspension of domestic flights except essential routes
- Mining and construction effectively halted
- Agricultural machinery grounded at a critical time of year for harvests
The Australian government will blame Trump.
The truth is that the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are the ones most at fault.
For the past ten years there have been voices in the Australian political wilderness warning that Australia was crazy for keeping just three weeks of fuel reserves while shutting down almost the entirety of our domestic refinery capacity.
This would never happen in China. I hate the CCP but I believe in studying and learning from your enemies. I believe in the Dengist maxim of ultimate pragmatism - ''it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.'' So look at what our enemies do.
The Chinese have a ruthlessly pragmatic approach to energy security, treating energy as a sovereign capability rather than a market commodity. They keep reserves totalling 1.3 BILLION barrels - enough for up to 6 months depending on rationing.
They have strategic foresight. They don't give a fuck about environmentalist protests - they will never voluntarily deindustrialise to meet the whims of progressives. They produce 4 million barrels of oil a day. They build massive refineries across their country and keep them open. They also made EVs a national priority - not for stupid woke reasons, but so as to try limit their dependence on foreign imports.
Just contrast their approach to energy security to Australia's suicidal approach.
We used to have eight oil refineries. Four closed under the Liberals and two under Labor. The last two of these closures took place in 2021 under Scott Morrison's Liberal government.
25 years ago we were almost completely self sufficient in fuel. We consumed 850,000 barrels of oil a day in 2000 and produced 820,000 barrels domestically. 95% self sufficient. Net oil imports in 2000 were just 12,000 barrels per day, essentially a rounding error.
Now we consume 1,145,000 barrels of oil a day while producing just 200,000 barrels. We need to import about 900,000 barrels a day for our economy and society to function.
What happened? Our mature oil fields ran out while endless environmental approvals and protests from activist groups hampered new production. The far-left Extinction Rebellion campaigns against new shale development and oil and gas production in Australia now stand exposed as essentially campaigns of terrorism against the national interest.
But our political class gave these lunatics a crucial assist by strangling new development to meet their whims. A significant section of the Australian public demanded this, maybe about 30-40% of the left-leaning voting population - and they held the nation hostage.
So their willingness to indulge infantile leftist whims is a big part of it. But the most fundamental problem I think is that our political class - like most post-Cold War political elites across the Western world - were simply sleep walking through the end of history. They believed the ''international rules based order'' - ironically a phrase LITERALLY coined by Kevin Rudd while Prime Minister - would hold forever. This is because they failed to understand the real source of political power. As Chairman Mao said, power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Real life is not like a university debating society or an Aaron Sorkin West Wing TV script. You cannot simply win the day with the perfect argument, the perfect comeback. The only thing that our ideological enemies understand is force and sovereign capacity.
Western political elites fundamentally failed to construct a theory of mind for their opponents. They believed that the entire world shared the same liberal psychology of educated upper middle class Western elites. They failed to understand that some of our opponents have radically different world views.
The Iranian regime for example is run by men who truly believe that they will help bring on a religious apocalypse to hasten the return of the Hidden Imam the twelfth and final Imam in Twelver Shia Islam, believed to have entered a state of occultation (concealment) to protect his life from Abbasid persecution.
This is literally what these men believe. It may seem strange and quaint to upper middle class liberals in the West but other human beings from radically different societies and cultural backgrounds believe different things to them. And given the fact that these political enemies are religious extremists, we cannot convince them with clever arguments and appeals to international law. Do the Iranians care for international law when they hit random civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz? No, of course not. They don't care.
So blame Trump all you like. Khamenei deserved to die, the mullahs are apocalyptic madmen trying to murder suicide the world economy. The Iranian regime is clearly already willing to murder-suicide the entire world economy for its objectives. It is better that they do it now when they are weak and on their knees rather than later when they have nuclear weapons and ICBMs that can reach London and Paris. Take them down now when they are weak or get North Korea on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump I believe understands this, other Western political leaders in their fantasy sleepwalk fail to understand.
Build sovereign capacity, project strength. That is the only option.
Australia should always be a close brother nation ally to the United States. I will always believe in Western civilizational unity. But we must adopt a defensive Gaullist posture in terms of sovereign capacity and capability. Otherwise we are a useless ally anyway. What use is an ally with 20 days fuel reserves?
My solution's for Australia.
Politically we must restart domestic oil production, open up shale production, rebuild refineries, build 50 nuclear power plants like France's Messmer Plan. Build nuclear weapons.
Culturally we must wake up from our post-Cold War slumber and re-enter history as a sovereign actor.
