Topics: Oil refineries, Trump’s comments, Iran War

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SHARRI MARKSON: Welcome back and joining me now is Liberal Senator Dave Sharma. Dave, thanks so much for your time. Look, I want to start off by showing you this graph which shows oil stockpiles by country. Let's bring it up if we can. And as you'll see, Australia is sitting near the bottom. If you've got good eyesight, Australia is right down the bottom with roughly 50 days of imports covered. Well short of the IEA's 90-day benchmark. Dave, this is the big issue and could be a serious problem over the coming weeks.

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DAVE SHARMA: It could be a serious problem, Sharri. You couple that with low oil stocks, inflation that's already running too high, government debt that's already too high, government spending that's already too high, and the government's capacity, the capacity of fiscal and monetary policy to respond to the external shock of an oil crisis is already very limited. All our shock buffers effectively have been shredded away, and this will only exacerbate that. And that's why we've seen price rises of fuel in Australia of around $0.50 a litre over the last 3 weeks, whereas in other countries with bigger stockpiles, the price rise has been more like $0.20 to $0.30 a litre. Still significant, but not nearly as significant as what we've seen here in Australia.

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SHARRI MARKSON: I want to ask you about Trump's position on allies not coming to— not even to join the war, but just to help keep open the Strait of Hormuz. What's your view?

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DAVE SHARMA: Well, look, Australia has sent an airborne early warning and control aircraft and 85 military personnel. I think that's appropriate. And if there are other further US requests, we should consider it. But look, I just— I do say that the US administration did not bring other allies into its confidence before initiating this conflict.

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SHARRI MARKSON: Why would they? Well, how could Trump trust any of these left-leaning leaders?

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DAVE SHARMA: But unlike the operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, where it was a coalition from the beginning, the US administration decided to act with Israel, diplomatically and otherwise, politically, I support the actions they've undertaken. But you can't take allies by surprise and then say, well, you're not helping out when you hadn't given them any warning. I do have some sympathy with the position of European allies here on that one.

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SHARRI MARKSON: There was plenty of warning. I mean, this was all canvassed in the media over about a 2-month period, whether this was going to happen or not and when it was going to happen.

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DAVE SHARMA: Yes, but then that's the time that you would have expected if the United States did want allies to contribute to this operation, that you would have started having conversations with those countries about what they can contribute and when they could contribute. Now, clearly those conversations weren't had, and the United States, for perfectly good and justifiable operational reasons, obviously didn't want allies involved in the initial stages of this campaign. But if they do now indeed want that to happen, inevitably, I mean, the US spent 2 months moving assets into position, at least 2 months, possibly longer before this operation.

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SHARRI MARKSON: Everyone knew. Exactly. I've got to go out of time, but just very quick final point is that the war began with that element of surprise attack on Ayatollah Khamenei. So you couldn't, couldn't risk it getting out. Dave Sharma, thanks so much for your time.

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DAVE SHARMA: Thanks so much, Sharri.

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[ENDS]