The managing director of Ron Finemore Transport says soaring fuel prices demonstrate the need for governments to consider sustainable solutions to meet Australia's energy needs, including the transport of goods around the country.
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Mark Parry said increased oil prices due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to the ban on oil exports was a shock.
"Clearly anybody that's using fuel in their business, and us delivering food and fuel, ironically, is seeing significant increase in what is one of our major costs," he said.
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"Trucks can't go up and down the highway and deliver those groceries and food without having diesel in them, they certainly are price pressures that will flow."
Mr Parry dispelled any idea of price gauging and said many smaller or independent transport companies were now in a state of survival.
"Companies don't have the ability to absorb these sorts of price increases and certainly in the trucking and transport industries we talk about a low margin business," he said.
"We're not a small truck company, but we're not huge; think about the number of people who own one, two or three trucks that are barely scratching a living together.
"All of a sudden they see these huge fuel cost increases, those cost increases have to be recovered for them to continue to have a living.
"We do get some recovery back through our customers, but indeed some of those recovery mechanisms take some months to flow through, so we've got to buy the fuel today at today's price so we may not get that recovered through our customers for some months."
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Mr Parry said transport was a necessary cost that would flow through to consumers, but governments needed to think about how to be more self-reliant to avoid issues that arose from future geopolitical issues.
"At a macro view, we're all worried about emissions and a cleaner world but at the end of the day without electricity or fuel ... we can't continue to run our lives as we do today," he said.
"So when we're thinking about a cleaner, less carbon-intensive world going forward, which I'm fully aligned with, we've just got to make sure that we've got an energy source that allows us to do all the things that we want to do at a cost that we can afford and that allows us to manage these significant black swan events as they occur.
"I don't think there's anything governments can do per say today.
"But certainly the ability for energy companies to continue to explore and develop projects in a cost-effective, time-efficient way, whilst managing the environmental constraints that we all want to apply is something that we need to look at."
Victoria Ellis
Victoria Ellis grew up on the Border and loves reporting for her home community. She is a University of Wollongong Journalism graduate. In 2018 Victoria was awarded the Bruce Gordon Scholarship for Journalism and completed a 10 week internship with WIN News Illawarra. In 2019 she was awarded The Border Mail's Cameron Thompson Scholarship, where she completed a three week internship, before taking up ongoing employment in 2021.
Victoria Ellis grew up on the Border and loves reporting for her home community. She is a University of Wollongong Journalism graduate. In 2018 Victoria was awarded the Bruce Gordon Scholarship for Journalism and completed a 10 week internship with WIN News Illawarra. In 2019 she was awarded The Border Mail's Cameron Thompson Scholarship, where she completed a three week internship, before taking up ongoing employment in 2021.
