The Albanese government has halved the fuel excise, reducing petrol and diesel prices by 26 cents per litre for three months.
The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here violates the first canon of conservative thought: the moral order is not arbitrary, but rooted in the transcendent order - justice, truth, piety - and expressed in custom, law, and the slow accretion of experience. To reduce the price of fuel by legislative fiat, without regard to the institutions that sustain energy, community, and responsibility, is not economic relief - it is the substitution of a momentary sentiment for a civilisational architecture.
This is not to deny the hardship many feel at the pump. Hardship is real, and compassion is due. But compassion without continuity is cruelty in disguise. Consider the ancient Roman annona - the state’s management of grain supply. When emperors lowered grain prices to appease the urban plebs, they did not ease suffering; they starved the very institutions - local markets, merchant networks, civic responsibility - that had, over centuries, made abundance possible. The short-term comfort came at the price of long-term fragility. So it is today: halving the fuel excise for three months is not policy; it is theatrical relief, staged for an audience whose attention span matches the duration of the subsidy. It treats the symptom - the price tag - while ignoring the disease: the severance of energy from responsibility, of consumption from stewardship.
What institution carries the moral order of fuel in a healthy society? Not the Treasury Department, nor the national grid, nor even the oil company boardroom. It is the local garage, the family farm, the small-town mechanic who knows the weight of a litre in his bones, the farmer who calculates not just profit but the health of his soil, the driver who, when fuel is dear, slows, combines trips, walks, thinks. These are the places where energy is not abstracted into a commodity but embedded in obligation. They are the loci of prudence - the virtue that governs action in light of enduring ends. When the state removes the price signal, it does not liberate the citizen; it disarms prudence. It tells the driver: your calculation is irrelevant. It tells the mechanic: your wisdom is obsolete. It tells the farmer: your land is merely input. In doing so, it hollows out the moral grammar of everyday life.
Libertarians may cheer this move as “deregulation,” but they misunderstand both liberty and regulation. Liberty requires order; without it, the strong impose their will upon the weak. Regulation need not be bureaucratic tyranny - it may be the quiet regulation of habit, the invisible hand of custom, the discipline of consequence. Remove the price signal, and you remove the feedback loop that teaches restraint. You do not create freedom; you create dependence - on the state to correct its own errors, on the market to adapt to artificial signals, on the citizen to forget how to think for himself.
And what of the third canon - prescription and prejudice? The prejudice here is not bias in the modern sense, but the inherited wisdom embedded in institutions: the understanding that energy is scarce, that extraction has cost, that transport has consequence. This prejudice is not superstition; it is the accumulated experience of generations who lived with limits. To discard it for the sake of temporary comfort is not progress - it is amnesia. The Albanese government, like so many before it, mistakes novelty for improvement. It does not see that the true test of a policy is not its popularity, nor its immediate effect, but its effect on the continuity of moral memory.
The true conservative does not mourn the old order for its own sake, but for the sake of what it carried. The garage on the corner, the family-run filling station, the local co-op that once kept fuel flowing not because of subsidies but because of trust and reciprocity - these are not relics. They are the living evidence that energy, like justice, like beauty, is best sustained not by top-down calculation, but by bottom-up responsibility.
What is required, then, is not lower prices, but deeper attention. Not a tax holiday, but a restoration of the institutions that teach us why price matters, why scarcity is not a bug but a feature of a moral world, why the driver, the mechanic, and the farmer must be allowed to bear witness to one another’s limits and labours. The permanent thing at stake is not fuel - it is prudence. And prudence, once silenced, is hard to.