Australia is still sleepwalking into a national crisis due to a dangerous lack of fuel security, with significant implications for the country’s food supply and economy, national security expert Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn (Ret’d) has warned.

John Blackburn. Image: Australian Security Leaders Climate Group

Speaking on a recent episode of the AgWatchers podcast, Mr Blackburn, who chairs an independent think tank focused on Australia’s resilience, said successive governments have failed to confront the nation’s growing vulnerabilities in energy, supply chains and health, leaving critical sectors like agriculture dangerously exposed.

Worse now than 2022

Mr Blackburn described Australia’s fuel security position as worse now than during the so-called “great fuel crisis of 2022” when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent boycotting of Russian gas led to  petrol price spikes across the globe.

That crisis prompted the-then Morrison Government to commit to undertaking a national fuel risk assessment in 2022.

However, when the person leading that process got fired the risk assessment stopped, meaning that three years later we still don’t actually have a national risk assessment, Mr Blackburn lamented.

Australia today has just two operating oil refineries, both of which are reliant on government subsidies which expire in 2027.

Creative accounting artificially boosts fuel stocks on hand

The International Energy Agency (IEA) requires its member nations including Australia to hold 90 days of net fuel imports on hand at any one time.

Australia currently holds just 54 days, Mr Blackburn revealed.

And even that  figure is only reached by counting fuel that is still enroute to Australia by sea, a practice rejected by the IEA.

“So yes, we’ve got a minimum stock holding obligation, but if you count the fuel we have in store we actually don’t meet it, but the government and the department says we do because we count it differently.

“So we’re sticking our head in the sand.”

Fuel insecurity equals food insecurity

Mr Blackburn, who served for 43 years in the RAAF, said he has increasingly turned his focus to food and agriculture, because he is alarmed by a dangerous lack of strategic planning and government inaction.

Governments kept stating Australia has no food security problem because we grow three times more food than we consume, but he said that was misleading.

“Look at what a farmer does and your dependence on fuel, on diesel and ad blue, on fertilisers, chemicals, workforce, agricultural machinery, water supply, things like that.”

A lot of food processed in Australia also relied on imported ingredients.

A 2023 House of Representatives inquiry identified food security as a growing challenge for Australia, yet Mr Blackburn said the Government was still yet to come to grips with the depth of the problem.

“If you look at the stock holding requirement for diesel for example of 32 days, and look at the January 2025 figures, fuel on land is 27 days, but they count a bit extra there.

“We had 23 years of days of jet fuel and 30 days of a normal car fuel in stock.

“With the diesel additives, because I don’t think we produce it in Australia anymore, we held about five weeks of stocks.

“Okay, you’ve got that.

“But what is the risk assessment that you have done to help you work out how many days in stocks you should have?

“And that’s the real issue when it comes back up. And as I said to the AMIC conference (in March 2025), the national risk assessment fell apart, but, there is no National Security or Resilience Strategy.

“The last time we did a national energy security assessment was 2011, and although the Liberal Government promised to do one in 2015 2016, 2017, they never did…

“So that means that as a country we’re operating on a lot of assumptions and a bit of misinformation.”

Current political system ‘incapable’ of solving problem

Mr Blackburn said he once believed the solution was to convince governments to act, but said he has now come to the realisation that Australia’s political system is “incapable” of addressing the problem and coming up with a coherent strategy.

“I’m not blaming individual politicians, I think they’ve all become trapped in a system, in a process, which forces this short term thinking.

“I mean just a really simple example – why would the two major parties compete on defence strategy and risk?

“You can’t fix or change a Defence Force in three years, it’s impossible, it’s a very large complex system.

“But they both get up and try and compete with each other and say ‘the other ones can’t do it and we can etc’. This is absolute stupidity.”

He cited the repeated warnings on national security delivered by late Senator Jim Molan, who served as a Major General in the Australian army before entering politics.

“When he was in politics we were trying to help him as he was pushing for a National Security strategy.

“Individual politicians understand these problems, but the party system prevents them from doing things.

“Jim got told twice by the Morrison government, ‘stop talking about this in public, it’s not an election issue’.

“So there are people who know they need to do things, but the party machinery actually stops them.”

The Scandinavian Solution – ‘Shared Responsibility’

Mr Blackburn now believes Australia must look to models like Finland, Norway and Sweden, where national resilience is treated as a shared responsibility between government, industry and community.

“In Finland, everyone contributes. They’ve got fuel, food and medicine stocks, they run national service, and they train citizens to respond to crises. That’s shared responsibility,” he said.

By contrast, Mr Blackburn said most Australians remain unaware of the risks the country faces—fuel, energy, shipping, biosecurity, and infrastructure among them—and assume someone else will fix them.

“Australia is fairly unique in that the non-indigenous population has never really got a shared story of having to fight for our survival as a country.”

Mr Blackburn said industry, community leaders and citizens must take the lead where politics is failing.

“It’s not beyond our ability to country to do something about it. We’ve got a lot of resources if we stop wasting them, we got a lot of smart people and so we could work our way through this, it will take decades to sort it out.

“The only thing that’s missing is leadership because we expect our politicians to do the leading and they’ve demonstrated repeatedly in the last 20 years, I wouldn’t say this about Kawke-Keating and Howard, I think there was very different leadership going on then.

“But basically, when we started this circus of Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, we’ve ended up in a complete mess of a political system of internal backstabbing, lack of coherent thought and lack of any idea of what’s important for the future of the country.

“It’s about getting into power and I think we’ve got to call that out.

“One of the most powerful things in the country is when the community writes to its local member and goes ‘I’m not happy. What are you going to do about something?’ It creates a bottom-up pressure that I’ve seen in the past produces results.

“We’re just going to do it on a very large scale.”