I’m sick of all the whinging about petrol prices
Really, who cares?
1. How much petrol do people actually use, anyway? People whinge and bitch and moan about petrol going up a few cents, and queue up for ages to try to buy petrol at the low point of the weekly price cycle - and for what? A tank will hold less than 100 litres. Typically around 50, but let’s say it’s 100 litres. That means that a price difference of 1 cent is worth a whole $1.00. A price difference of 5 cents is a measly $5.00, less than the price of a cheap bought lunch. For the average driver, they’ll buy 100 litres once or maybe twice per week.
Who gives a damn?
If $1.00 or even $5.00 makes such a difference to someone’s budget then they’re in serious financial trouble anyway - so much trouble that they shouldn’t even think about having a car, because they can’t afford it.
Here’s a novel thought: they could drive less, make their kids walk to school, catch public transport, ride a bike, walk to the milkbar rather than drive, make sandwiches to take to work/school, and so on. They could also buy less of the worthless crap they buy (like biscuits and cakes and bottles of coke and other rubbish). There are thousands of things people could do so that they don’t have to give a damn about a few cents per litre.
Even better, if people reduce demand enough, they can seriously hurt the speculator bastards who have driven oil prices up so much in recent months….at least a quarter of the current price per barrel of oil is due to commodity speculators driving the price up. Hit the bastards where it hurts, drop demand so much that they lose serious money. If the price of petrol bothers you, don’t whinge, get revenge.
Actually, I’m entirely unconvinced that the general public actually care all that much about petrol prices anyway. It looks and feels much more like an astro-turfing campaign by the oil companies and petrol distributors - especially the recent crap about reducing the excise by 5c/litre, anyone can see that if the government does that the petrol companies will, within weeks, increase prices so that THEY get the 5c/litre rather than the government, resulting in yet another transfer of wealth from the public purse to private corporations. Same for all the bullshit about the fuel price watch program - it’s obvious that the opposition to that comes directly from the petrol companies who don’t want buyers to have good information to base their purchasing decisions on.
It’s also a useful distraction and pretend-debate for the government and the opposition - they can rant and rave and score points over a trivial, bullshit non-issue like this, and nobody will notice that nothing of any real substance or worth ever gets debated in parliament…and the media are either colluding in this or are too stupid to avoid getting sucked in.
2. We have the fourth-cheapest petrol in the world. So all this moaning is not about petrol being more expensive than it should be, it’s about not being quite as unreasonably privileged as we were in the past.
3. Oil prices are *inevitably* going up, they’re *never* coming back down. Get used to it, it’s only going to get worse from here - much worse. Instead of endlessly whining about the inevitable, focus on alternatives - like *DEMANDING* that the government start paying more than just empty tokenistic lip-service to the idea of alternative/renewable energy sources.
4. IMO, the sooner petrol hits $5.00 per litre or more, the better. By then we’ll really have to have functional alternative energy sources in place. Because if we don’t, we’re completely screwed.