Filling the Tank While Waiting for the RBA to Ruin Your Week

I filled up on the weekend and the number on the pump felt like a personal insult. Not shocking exactly, more like watching a slow-motion car crash you already knew was coming. Ninety-eight cents a litre more than a month ago, and everyone from roadhouse owners to freight companies is saying the same thing: this is just the start. Fuel surcharges are creeping back onto invoices, diesel is up, and somewhere in the background the RBA is having another meeting about whether to raise rates again to fight inflation that, by most accounts, has bugger all to do with how many mortgages people are carrying.

I’ve been dipping into r/AusFinance the last day or so, partly out of morbid curiosity, partly because misery loves company. The thread on fuel prices had that particular flavour of Reddit gallows humour that shows up whenever something genuinely bad is happening and nobody in charge seems to have a plan. Someone joked about buying a small motorcycle to save on petrol. Someone else pointed out, correctly, that if you can afford to drive less, traffic gets a bit lighter and the air gets a bit cleaner, silver linings for those who can afford to notice them. A few people speculated, half seriously, that global instability might end up being the thing that finally pushes households toward EVs faster than any government incentive ever could. I don’t know if that’s optimism or just the internet trying to find a joke in a bad situation. Probably both.

What struck me more was the argument happening one thread over, about whether raising interest rates actually does anything when the inflation in question is being driven by oil supply shocks out of the Middle East rather than people splurging on smashed avo. One commenter put it bluntly: the Saudis aren’t going to magically produce more diesel because the RBA lifted the cash rate. Another pushed back, arguing that rate rises aren’t meant to fix the oil price, they’re meant to choke off enough demand elsewhere that the overall inflation number doesn’t run away completely. Both of these things can be true at once, and that’s the bit that never makes it into a headline. Rates are a blunt instrument being used on a problem that’s partly plumbing and partly geopolitics, and blunt instruments hurt the people holding the mortgage a lot more than the people who own their place outright and are sitting pretty on a high-yield savings account.

I don’t have a tidy answer for who’s right there. I’ve got a mortgage, so I’m obviously not neutral. But I also think the “boomers with savings accounts are secretly driving inflation” narrative that gets thrown around gets a bit too much airtime for how little it actually explains. It’s a satisfying story because it gives you someone to be annoyed at. Real inflation, this round anyway, looks messier and less satisfying: war disrupting oil, freight costs stacking on top of freight costs, housing costs that have nothing to do with anyone’s latte habit.

Closer to home, it’s the small daily arithmetic that gets you. I work hybrid, so I’m not filling the tank every single day like I used to, and I still felt it at the pump. I think about the people who don’t have that flexibility, tradies, delivery drivers, anyone doing a genuine commute five days a week from somewhere out past Pakenham or Sunbury because that’s where they could actually afford to buy. For them this isn’t an abstract macroeconomic debate about the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. It’s just less money left over on a Thursday.

There’s a comment in that thread that stuck with me, something like “what a bummer to be born right at the end of the Fuck Around century, just in time to live through the Find Out century.” Bleak, but it landed. I don’t think we’re doomed, and I’m wary of anyone, including myself, who reaches for a confident conclusion about where any of this ends up. But I do think we’re overdue for a public conversation about fuel excise, transport affordability, and whether we want a country where getting to work is this exposed to whatever’s happening on the other side of the planet. Free or cheaper public transport during price spikes, better rebates for people who genuinely can’t avoid driving, more urgency on EV infrastructure that isn’t just for people who can already afford a Tesla. None of it fixes the oil price. All of it would take some of the sting out of being at the mercy of it.

In the meantime I’ll keep an eye on the tank gauge and try not to read too much into any single RBA meeting. Some problems get solved by a cash rate decision. This one, I suspect, mostly just gets outlasted.