The oil crisis has not only caused petrol prices to soar, it has revealed just how little competition there is among the big oil companies. A couple weeks ago the ACCC announced that it would be looking into uncompetitive behaviour by petrol companies in the rural areas.
The article shows how petrol price rises have been affected in different parts of Australia.
https://thepoint.com.au/news/260327-petrol-prices-are-soaring-in-sync-collusion-or-coincidence
I’m so fucking angry that the government won’t fucking call out Trump’s idiocy here.
Us “middle powers” need to be standing together and stating the obvious - Trump has fucked everyone by recklessly starting a forever war with no plan to mitigate the inevitable consequences.
Everyone is terrified of upsetting this man child lest he tariff us or some such. We’re all going to bear the stupid-tariff for the next decade now.
If Australia, and those ideologically aligned with us like UK, Canada, France, and Germany, agreed to tax services provided by the magnificent 7 (google, microsoft, nvidia, openai, meta, amazon) until Trump is no longer in office, he’d be gone in a month.
I’m so sick of everyone pretending like Grandpa is still ok to drive to the shops because no one wants to deal with the consequences of taking his license.
Counter argument - the more we find out from this war, the more it’s clear that Iran absolutely 100% needs to be stopped. They have been developing long range weapons to target far away countries, and have been enriching uranium to make nuclear warheads. They are run by authoritarian terrorists and have been open and clear about their desire to destroy the western world.
Does the current situation suck? Yes. Is the USA annihilating their entire war arsenal and terrorist leaders worth it in the long run? Also yes. Former American presidents arearguably responsible for letting Iran get to where they are now. Thank god one of them has finally decided to do something about it. The world will be better off when this is over. It won’t be a “forever war” anymore than it already was before the US went in the other week. Iran is at war with the western world at all times.
All this war is proving is that Iran was incredibly restrained for the last half a century and that they would have been smarter to actually develop nuclear weapons because then the USA and Israel might be forced to just leave them the fuck alone.
Mate, youre a fucken idiot. Everything you just siad was utter bullshit.
the current US government is literally built around a bunch of fucking morons entertaining a lunatic. Trump blarts out some bullshit on behalf of his puppeteers, the flying monkeys scurry about to make it Reality. This expands out further to allies and other nations.
Thing is, Iran doesn’t want to play flying monkey. So Trump just keeps blarting his bullshit and wondering why Reality is not occurring any more. And the flying monkeys literally can no longer conceive of another way to function short of going yes sir no sir three bags full sir gargle gargle.
We’ve spent eighty years kissing american arse and now we don’t know what to do when it’s time for daddy to go into the hospice
Oh, there is definitely price collusion happening - just take one look at the way the Oil futures contracts are traded, and the massive bets being placed on sites like Kalshi and Polimarket.
But that’s impacting every nation, not just us - the leash is getting yanked much higher up the food chain than people like to point the finger here domestically at Shell/BP etc. & all thanks to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran damaging or destroying something like ~40% of all Middle East oil refining capacity.
Bit of a tangent, but I honestly think we need to step out from behind the US’s skirt at some point, they have proven to no longer be a reliable and trustworthy partner.
But what do we do beyond that, to ensure our national sovereignty - and prevent us getting Ukraine’d or Iran’d - short of developing and stockpiling our own nuclear arsenal?