Panic at 7.30

Effective immediately - or as of 7:30pm last night, to be specific - you can stop worrying about co-payments, uni fees, asylum seekers, metadata, climate change, Ebola, racehorses, budget emergencies, budgie smugglers, soldiers’ salaries, girlie-men, burqas, destroying the joint, legalising the joint, exams or what’s for dinner. Those trifles aren’t gonna matter in the face of the Next Big Threat: the Petrol Crisis.

The ABC’s nightly current affairs show 7.30, in cahoots with Senator John Madigan, has delivered to us a new reason to panic. Australia could run out of petrol. Here's what the Senator had to say:

SEN. JOHN MADIGAN, INDEPENDENT: In the event that there is a threat what do we do? At the peacetime when everything is going along nicely there isn't a threat, but in the event that something does happen what is the plan, how are we going to do it? Other countries in the world have mandated fuel stocks. We don't.

Al Qaeda, the blueprint for Islamic terrorism and forerunner to Daesh, has urged its followers to consider a disruption to the world’s SLOCs – literally, “Sea Lanes of Communication” but more commonly, the usual maritime trade and naval routes around the globe. Specifically, Al Qaeda has mentioned the Malacca Straits, a narrow passage of water between Malaysia and Indonesia, through which impressive quantities of the world’s shipping passes.

Ensuring safe passage through the Straits of Malacca is of particular importance to Australia as the majority of ocean imports from Asia and Europe will pass that way. This includes oil. Unlike the USA, Australia has no strategic oil reserves, so when we run out, that's it until more arrives. What we do have are dwindling on shore processing facilities and limited domestic oil production, so any interruption to ocean freight through the Straits of Malacca will impact our oil supply.

The 7.30 team interviewed an impressive range of subject matter experts and opinion makers from the oil industry, the military, motoring bodies and petrol retailers, yet not one of them could quantify the likelihood of an attack. 

Everyone except the oil company man (whose industry controls the amount of petrol in the market at any given time) agreed that any interruption to our ability to import oil would be bad. Very bad.

JOHN BLACKBURN, AIR VICE MARSHAL (RET.): If there's an interruption to the fuel supply chain coming in from overseas, after about a week we're going to run into serious problems. Without fuel can't go to work, can't get to school, you can't get food.

GRAHAM BLIGHT, NRMA: Imagine if everybody lost 50 per cent of their fuel, what would happen to industry? What would happen to agriculture? What would happen to Defence?

So this can mutate into a very serious issue for us.

Oh god! Now it’s mutating! Panic faster, people! Run around in tiny circles, stopping only to wring our hands until we've set aside reason, experience and evidence and replaced them with fear. Only then can we shove our thumbs in our mouths, hide under the desk and rock back and forth. We are alert, we are alarmed, and goshdarnit, we’re all doooomed!

Shipping in the Straits of Malacca

Did I mention that the threat is coming from Al Qaeda? With close to 1 in 4 Australians already admitting to negative feelings towards Muslims, let’s throw some petrol on those flames too.

Actually let’s not: let’s conserve every last drop! In fact, why aren’t we rationing petrol already? Rationing always goes well with panic and war and stuff.

But back up a moment. How, exactly, could someone disrupt the flow of vessels through the Straits? The answer would obviously be by blocking it with something substantially bigger than Lego blocks. It’s actually less than 3km wide at the choke point near Singapore, but I doubt Al Qaeda is into building bridges. That would be kind of obvious, it would take at least until Johnny Farnham’s next retirement, and wouldn’t block the strait anyway. I just like bridges.

They could block the choke point with a flotilla of hostile vessels. The problem there is that ships are expensive, and while they might be able to cobble together a flotilla from the pirate boats that already practice terrorism in the Malacca Straits, the flotilla would need to be fairly still…which makes them an easy target for the goodies (TM Tony Abbott) to destroy. Just call in an airstrike or three, and boom! No more nasties, other than the world’s largest environmental disaster, which would just coincidentally, also close the Straits of Malacca.

The aftermath of Gulf War 1: fire on water

They could try sinking ships, one by one, as they enter the Strait. In fact, sinking just one ship would prevent the rest from entering – it’s that colossal environmental disaster thing again -  so there’s the Strait, out of action. Now, every ship would have to transit via the other SLOCs nearby:  Lombok Strait, Makassar Strait, Sibutu Passage and Mindoro Strait. They’re all longer and hence more expensive, so businesses don’t use them unless they have to.

But they could. The world will not stop - it'll just take a detour.

There are others options too. We could consider trans Pacific supply from the Americas, or surface transport north to Europe, east across the top and ocean freight via the Sea of Okhotsk and Japan. Both would be hideously expensive – but so would Australia running out of petrol.

Thankfully, we've got that covered too: 

IAN MACFARLANE'S STATEMENT: At any given time Australia has crude oil and refined product on the way to Australia by diverse shipping routes... In the unlikely event that fuel supply is severely disrupted the Australian Government has powers to prioritise essential supply.

ANDREW BREWER, GM SUPPLY, CALTEX AUSTRALIA: I look at how Australia has handled fuel supply interruptions in the past. We've seen multiple events internationally; Fukushima, GFC, local events such as Queensland cyclones, and in all those cases the industry has been able to provide fuel reliably and securely for customers.

So dial back the panic just enough to consider this: we still don’t know if it’s likely to happen, and there’s nothing you or I could do about it anyway. The great news is that there's untold sh*t-tonnes of metadata doing something impressive, and that's supposed to keep us all safe.

So thanks, Senator Madigan and 7.30, for loading us up with something else to fret about. We'll take a pass this time. 

Everyone, stand down and resume your normal internet panic stations. Here are some kittens to help.