Country Today - April 10th

April 10, 2026·24 min·1 clip

Why are rural Australians hit hardest by the fuel crisis, and how did we end up with so few reserves for farmers?

1. Country Today, hosted by Libby Price, examines Australia's fuel supply crisis and its downstream effects on rural industries in this April 10th edition. 2. Tony Wood, who leads the Grattan Institute's energy program, is the primary expert voice on the fuel supply chain analysis. 3. The episode's core argument is that Australia's fuel vulnerability is structural—a product of deliberate policy decisions over 25 years—and the right response is to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels rather than rebuild domestic refining capacity. 4. Wood explains that 25 years ago Australia had domestic refineries and crude oil, but those refineries became old and expensive while large new refineries were being built in Southeast Asia, making it economically rational to import refined fuel. 5. Australia today has only two refineries left, one in Brisbane and one in Geelong, and exports most of its Northwest Shelf crude to Singapore because that crude is closer to Singapore than to Melbourne and less suited to making Australian fuel blends. 6. The result, Wood says, is a complex import-dependent supply chain where disruption reaches rural Australians first because they live furthest from the coastal ports where fuel arrives. 7. Wood argues against building new refineries as too slow, too expensive, and counter to greenhouse gas reduction goals, instead advocating biodiesel from agricultural waste and accelerated electric truck adoption. 8. Dr John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute describes contemporary crisis management as operating in three dimensions: temporal (crises don't end cleanly), concurrent (fuel, fertiliser, cyclone, and flood crises at the same time), and cascading (fuel shortage leads to distribution failure leads to feedlot problems). 9. Coyne supports Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's trip to Singapore and Malaysia to negotiate fuel access as 'absolutely the right thing to do' but warns the supply and pricing challenges will persist for six to twelve months even if the ceasefire holds. 10. Coyne draws on growing up on a remote cattle station to argue that Australia needs to revive the pre-globalisation habit of maintaining multiple redundant supplies rather than relying on just-in-time logistics. 11. Grain consultant Colin Egan of Jumbuck Ag reports that East Coast APW wheat futures rose $5 a tonne to $262 per tonne for January delivery the day before recording, as markets responded cautiously to the Middle East ceasefire. 12. Egan says northern New South Wales growers facing extreme dry conditions and uncertain fertiliser supply may choose to park machinery and skip winter crop planting, waiting until September to reassess. 13. Egan warns that a global fertiliser shortage will reduce 2026 crop production and could support grain prices through late 2026. 14. In the Latrobe Valley segment, Luke Stuckey, a third-generation beef cattle producer and president of Latrobe Irrigators, says rehabilitation plans for three retired coal mines include filling them with Latrobe River water. 15. Stuckey says numbers discussed for mine rehabilitation are around 700,000 megalitres per mine—roughly 2.1 million megalitres total—against the irrigators' 13,000 megalitre entitlement. 16. Stuckey describes how irrigators have invested in reuse dams and upgraded systems to increase water efficiency, and calls the mine-filling plan 'absolutely no water efficiency' and 'just a great waste of a very valuable resource.' 17. The tone across segments is factual and interview-driven, with Libby Price asking pointed questions and letting expert and producer voices run at length; Jade Egan is credited with field interviews for Wood, Coyne, and Egan. 18. The episode has a rural-advocacy frame: agricultural producers are presented as bearing disproportionate costs of fuel, fertiliser, and water policy decisions made at a national level. 19. Rural Australians concerned about fuel security, irrigation rights, or grain market volatility will find this episode directly relevant. 20. Urban listeners without context for Australian agricultural policy or commodity markets will find significant portions inaccessible without background knowledge.

As heard by us

A steady rural briefing on fuel, supply chains, and future shocks.

Country Today treats a fuel crisis as a plain rural systems story: thin reserves, closed supply lines, and the pressure that lands on rural Australians.

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Why you'd press play

You want a grounded take on why rural fuel pain keeps hitting first.

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