Having abandoned the notion of pretending it isn’t facing a fuel crisis, the Albanese government’s bright idea to bring down petrol prices was to spend $20 million on an advertising campaign offering handy tips on how to increase fuel efficiency by driving smoothly, pumping up tyres, removing roof racks, and combining trips.

As if to help sell the message, the PM provided a textbook example of how not to combine trips by flying to Singapore to shore up supplies with our major oil refiner and then returning to Australia before flying to Brunei and Malaysia. Of course, if Albanese really wanted to save fuel, he could have hopped on a Zoom call, but he didn’t earn the moniker Airmiles Albo by staying in the office.

The ad campaign hasn’t won many supporters. On Sunrise, host Nat Barr asked Employment Minister Tanya Plibersek if she thought the advertisements were a good investment. Naturally, Plibersek did. It would be more than her job to admit they are patronising drivel. But Barr wasn’t having a bar of it, so to speak.

‘Do you really, Tanya?’ she asked before Plibersek replied that she ‘absolutely’ did.

Plibersek however is not someone who you’d turn to for investment advice, given that she thought it was a good idea to shut down the McPhillamy’s gold mine, valued at over a billion dollars, to preserve the songline of the mythical, blue-banded bee, which is probably about as useful or interesting as the ad campaign on tips to save fuel.

If the government really wanted to save not just fuel but money, it could recycle a brilliant ad campaign that ran in 1979 in response to the second oil crisis, which was created by the revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power in Iran. Its catchy jingle was written by Alan Morris and Allan Johnson, the team at Mojo, who brought Australia the Meadow Lea jingle (‘You oughta be congratulated’) and the Tooheys beer ad (‘I feel like a Tooheys’) . The animated cartoons of nude Aussies rallying round to save petrol were drawn by Larry Pickering, known for his nude caricatures of public figures. Sadly, it’s safe to say that if Australia is facing another oil shock in half a century, no one will want to recycle the Albanese ads.

Nobody has been talking about recycling the Rudd government’s fuel-saving thought bubble either.

Against the advice of various government departments, then Treasurer Wayne Swan and his acolyte Jim Chalmers were convinced that the way to bring down the price of petrol was to create a national, compulsory fuel monitoring scheme that would force petrol retailers to say, a day in advance, what price they would charge and then prevent them from lowering their prices to match or better the competition. It would all be recorded on an app called FuelWatch, which had as much success as Bowen’s green hydrogen pipedream.

For four years, the Albanese government has done everything in its power to drive the extinction of fossil fuels, yet the irony is that the massive shortage driven by the war with Iran has made it clear, even to Albanese, how vital they are.

On his return from Singapore last week, Albanese said the top three things on his agenda were ‘Supply, supply, and supply’, as if he were at last embarking on a course of Economics for Dummies.

Albanese refused to approve a major extension of Australia’s largest LNG development until after last year’s election. But when the Singaporeans asked him to guarantee their supply of LNG, perhaps he also learnt the value of demand, demand, demand.

Yet the answer to Albanese’s quest is right under his feet, and the three-word slogan he should be looking for is ‘Drill, baby, drill’. Or ‘Dig, baby, dig’ if he was inclined to set up a plant to convert coal to fuel. He is not.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said last Sunday, ‘I’m not aware of a single country that’s saying we need more fossil fuels; the global investment community is moving away from fossil fuels and into clean energy.’

Yes, minister. Not a single country other than China, which has a large pipeline of new coal‑fired power proposals and continued coal approvals in 2024-2025; Russia, which has ongoing coal project development and infrastructure expansion aimed at Asian markets; Indonesia, which has newly advanced coal projects and a growing coal export pipeline; India, which has continued approvals and commissioning of new coal power and mining projects to meet demand; the United States, with federal and state actions increasing oil, gas and some coal leasing/permits; Canada, with approvals and ongoing expansion in oil; and Brazil, Mexico, Angola, Nigeria, several African producers, and, even, Australia, with multiple coal mine expansions and new oil and gas approvals.

Bowen’s devotion to renewable energy has not been daunted by the failure of green hydrogen, the massive blowout in the cost of the Snowy 2.0 Hydro Scheme, the waning investor enthusiasm for wind power, and relentlessly rising electricity prices.

As Bowen sees it, ‘Weapons and tankers and pipelines can be disrupted by conflict,’ but ‘renewable energy can’t be interrupted by a war halfway around the world.’

Warming to the theme, he told reporters, ‘Solar doesn’t have to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, and wind farms don’t get blockaded. The sun is 150 million kilometres away — the light gets here in about eight minutes.’

All that is true, but it is also true that solar is interrupted by the Earth’s rotation on its axis, blocking the flow of sunbeams for approximately 50 per cent of each day (also known as ‘night’), as does the random transit of clouds for indeterminate periods.

Yet, even if his ardour remains undimmed, Bowen and Albanese were forced to hold their noses and visit the Lytton refinery near the port of Brisbane, following in the footsteps of then Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his then energy minister, Angus Taylor, who used their visit in May 2021 to announce a deal to stop the Ampol refinery moving offshore.

How times have changed. Bowen was asked for an update on Labor’s industry-throttling safeguard mechanism, its key means of reducing the emissions of large industrial facilities like the refinery. Bowen replied primly that, ‘It’s not on the top of my to-do list right now, to be frank with you. I’m focused on other matters.’ Thank heaven for that.