When governments start calling emergency roundtables it usually means one thing: the planning should have happened years ago.

Last week the Western Australian Government convened a Fuel Security Roundtable in response to supply disruptions linked to rising tensions in the Middle East. The usual suspects – suits, stakeholders and assorted industry representatives, including yours truly – were summoned to Dumas House for what might politely be described as a strategic discussion and less politely as the traditional Australian response to a crisis: a meeting.

There was the inevitable Welcome to Country by the Premier. Thankfully we were spared the explanation of how sixty thousand years of continuous culture might assist us in managing diesel inventories.

Then we began the long journey around the table.

Vegetable growers. Fuel retailers. Transport operators. Mining companies. Everyone had something earnest to say. There was plenty of grave nodding by ministers, intense note-taking by the bureaucrats and the media dutifully recording the proceedings so the public could see that the situation was being taken very seriously indeed.

The outcome was a seven-point plan. There is always a plan. The difficulty is that it is, well, a plan.

Three of the seven points involve more consultation and communication. A couple deal with prioritising ships and tug movements in port. At one stage there was discussion about allowing fuel tankers to operate overweight, which is impressive given the trailers themselves do not change in size.

There was also something about prioritising regional areas. What there was not was anything resembling a system to track where fuel shortages are actually occurring, or to require distributors to send fuel where it is most needed.

Emergency roundtables are rarely signs of decisive action. They are signs that governments have been caught slightly flat-footed and would now like to appear as though they are firmly in control of the steering wheel. Even if there is no petrol in the vehicle.

Roundtables are the policy equivalent of switching on the hazard lights after the engine has already stalled. They signal concern. They buy time. And they create the comforting illusion that somebody somewhere is managing the situation.

But fuel security is not the sort of problem that can be solved by a meeting.

It is the sort of problem that should have been anticipated years earlier, quietly planned for and largely invisible to the public when the crisis eventually arrives.

Because the idea that conflict in the Middle East might disrupt global fuel markets is hardly a novel concept.

The region has been the world’s geopolitical pressure valve for half a century. Every generation gets its reminder that the modern economy runs on a delicate system of oil tankers moving through a handful of narrow sea lanes.

And every generation acts surprised when something goes wrong.

The history is hardly obscure.

• 1973 – the Arab oil embargo shuts down supply to the West.
• 1979 – the Iranian revolution sends oil prices through the roof.
• 1990 – Saddam Hussein rolls into Kuwait and the Gulf War follows.
• 2003 – the Iraq War rattles markets again.
• 2011 – the Arab Spring disrupts production across North Africa.
• 2022 – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends energy markets into chaos.
• 2026 – tensions around Iran once again put the Strait of Hormuz in the headlines.

Different actors. Same script.

Roughly one fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water where a few missiles, mines or insurance withdrawals can send global markets into a panic.

The punters understand this instinctively.

When something goes wrong somewhere between the Strait of Hormuz, the Dardanelles and the South China Sea, motorists everywhere head for the bowser.

Which raises the obvious question. Why are we only having this conversation now?

Western Australia burns through roughly 21 million litres of fuel every day – the equivalent of about 300 B-double tanker loads. Around 40 per cent of that fuel goes straight into the mining sector.

We are one of the most isolated economies on earth and one of the most diesel-dependent. Our nearest refinery is a week’s sailing away.

Yet we maintain reserves that barely last a month.

What makes the current situation even more curious is that the state government already has the legal authority to manage a fuel disruption. It simply prefers not to use it.

Under Western Australia’s Emergency Management Act 2005 and the Liquid Fuel (Emergency Provisions) Act, the government has sweeping powers during supply disruptions. It can require wholesalers to report daily stock levels, direct fuel to particular regions, control distribution and compel companies to disclose supply movements.

In other words, if the government wanted to know exactly where fuel was and where it was going, it could require distributors to provide daily updates across the entire state.

That is how emergency fuel allocation systems operate in countries that take energy security seriously.

Yet two weeks after tensions in the Middle East began rattling global markets, there is still no central system tracking fuel availability in regional Western Australia.

Instead the government is relying on organisations like the Grower Group Alliance, WA Farmers and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association to ring around country towns and report which servos are about to run dry.

Between the Premier’s Department, the Minister for Regional Development, the Minister for Energy and the Minister for Emergency Services, the state commands thousands of public servants.

Yet the task of working out which Wheatbelt towns are short of diesel has effectively been outsourced to farmer organisations with neither the staff nor the legal authority to obtain accurate information.

This is, to put it mildly, an unusual allocation of responsibility.

Part of the problem lies in the way Australia’s fuel system actually operates.

The dirty little secret is that it runs on a just-in-time logistics model. Most regional depots hold less than a week’s supply and rely on a steady stream of tanker deliveries from coastal terminals like Kwinana. When panic buying begins in the cities those tankers are quickly redirected toward metropolitan demand, which is louder, closer and politically more visible.

That is why country towns are usually the first places to run dry.

None of this is complicated. A basic emergency fuel management system would require distributors to report daily stock levels at terminals and depots, track tanker movements across the state and allocate deliveries according to regional need.

Governments around the world operate precisely these systems during supply disruptions.

Western Australia, two weeks into a global fuel scare, is still relying on phone calls.

Instead the government prefers the State Hazard Plan for Energy Supply Disruption, which is essentially a coordination document. It brings industry together. It encourages cooperation. It is, in other words, another plan.

The more robust legal tools sitting in the 2005 legislation remain untouched.

So the system limps along hoping the market will sort things out.

Which, in fairness, it eventually does. The market’s cure for panic buying is simple. Raise the price.

As fuel nudged toward three dollars a litre motorists suddenly rediscovered the joys of staying home.

Economists call this scarcity pricing. Motorists call it daylight robbery. Either way the result is the same: higher prices reduce demand until supply catches up.

FuelWatch does not prevent this. It merely locks prices in for 24 hours. The ACCC prevents collusion, but it cannot stop prices rising when supply tightens.

Ultimately the only thing that truly stops panic buying is flooding the market with fuel.

And that is precisely what Australia cannot do.

Because we simply do not have the reserves.

Australia requires importers to hold strategic fuel stocks, but the total sits at roughly one third of the 90 day level the country has committed to internationally.

Strategic reserves matter for another reason.

They calm markets.

When traders and motorists know there are 90 days of fuel sitting in storage somewhere in the system, panic rarely begins. But when the public knows the cupboard holds only 30 days of supply, every headline out of the Middle East becomes a signal to fill the tank.

The oil companies argue that building larger reserves would be expensive. Of course it would.

But so is Metronet, freeways and renewable wind farms, and somehow we manage to build those.

They also argue that fuel degrades in storage. Petrol can deteriorate after about 90 days and diesel after six to twelve months.

But reserves can be cycled through the system, exactly as they are in other countries.

There is also the claim that storage tanks require enormous areas of land.

True – if you insist on building them in the middle of capital cities.

Australia, however, is a very large country.

There are plenty of locations – Bunbury, Geraldton, Geelong, Wollongong – where substantial storage facilities could be built and fuel distributed across the national network.

We could even store crude oil in underground salt caverns, as many countries do.

Though that would require refineries.

And Australia now has only two left – in Melbourne and Gladstone.

Meanwhile the Western Australian Government quietly holds the power to impose its own reserve requirements on fuel importers using state infrastructure.

That possibility has not yet appeared on the roundtable agenda. Perhaps it should.

At the federal level reserves exist, but they are far too small to stabilise markets. The recent release of 20 per cent of Australia’s strategic fuel stocks equates to roughly five days of supply, and prices remain stubbornly high.

The market, it seems, is not easily impressed by a few days of diesel.

If Australia does not like the market’s answer, governments have two choices.

In the short term they can release reserves and allocate fuel according to need using the emergency powers already on the statute books.

In the longer term they can build genuine ninety-day strategic fuel reserves, as most developed nations already have.

Until then we will continue to run the same experiment every time tensions rise in the Middle East.

For regional Australia the practical lesson is rather straightforward. Farmers learned it long ago.

We build big dams because we cannot rely on the country water scheme.

We keep diesel generators because Western Power occasionally forgets where the electricity is meant to go.

We send our children away to school because education in the bush remains a work in progress.

And now it appears we must also keep 90 days of diesel on farm, because once again government planning cannot be relied upon.

Which leads to one final policy recommendation. Don’t dismiss the electric ute too quickly. It might turn out to be the only vehicle not waiting in line at the servo.

Related story: Lessons on Roundtables