A " Protected " industry ?

A comment by Caltex yesterday should strike fear into the heart of every motorist in Australia.  The company is considering closing it's two oil refineries here, with the loss of eight hundred jobs.

Caltex has refined oil into petrol, diesel and aviation kerosene in Australia for seventy years.  We are still an oil producing country and it seems ludicrous that this oil might end up being shipped to refineries somewhere in Asia, and then shipped back here to supply our motoring needs.

Apart from the sheer economic logic, it would leave us vulnerable to a future Asian war that might disrupt sea traffic - and without fuel the entire Australian economy would quickly grind to a halt.  Oil refining is a strategic industry - and as such it should be protected.

The pundits have long claimed that world oil will run dry soon and in particular - that Australia has only a mere matter of years left in oil production.   Despite this gloomy outlook, we continue to have oil strikes and it seems that there is a lot more oil in Australia than even the most optimistic people of science predicted.

It is not much use having near sustainability in oil - if we lack the means to refine it into products we can use.

The reason given for this Caltex proposal is the strong Australian dollar.  When oil was first discovered in Australia the Federal government of that time decreed that it would be wise to tax it heavily as it was a dwindling resource - and so Australians were not treated to cheap oil products, as was the case in many oil producing countries.

Now would be the time to remit some of that tax back to make refining in Australia economic in comparison to low wage refineries in Asia.   This would be justified under the umbrella of " defence needs ".   The worst possible scenarion would be to lose our refining capacity, because oil and it's by-products are the essential tools of our defense capacity.

And if push comes to shove, rather than allow those two refineries to close - they should be acquired under government ownership as part of our " national interest " economic structure !