So we are in Oil Shock – It will get worse!
We all need to realise that oil is a scarce commodity. The way Australian cities have been set up with very limited transport infrastructure other than roads, large clocks of land for each house etc will make some of our outer suburbs close to uninhabitable. People in the outer suburbs use six times as much fuel as those close to the city centre. It is not as if we did not know about this!
At the same time tourism is decreasing and airlines are reducing flights, especially the low cost flights to holiday destinations.
The longer we delay restructuring our transport infrastructure, the worse the pain will be.
Perhaps a short term help would be more car and bike parking on bus routes with much more regular buses and maybe smaller feeder buses in local areas, for school pickups and to local shopping centres so that the existing road infrastructure can be used for fleets of subsidised buses and allow the fuel price for private use to increase as it naturally will and should once the carbon accounting is added to it.
We should look at oil shock as an opportunity to get ourselves reorganised instead of just trying to pretend it isn’t happening and the we also need to be aware that the cost of electricity is also on the way up.
Whatever they do the voters will hate it.
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