Canberra urges Australians to keep Easter travel plans despite diesel shortages at 300+ service stations

With the Easter long-weekend exodus under way, Energy Minister Chris Bowen moved on 4 April 2026 to calm travellers worried by patchy fuel supplies caused by the six-week-old Middle-East conflict. Speaking in Sydney, Bowen confirmed that 312 of Australia’s 8,000 service stations – mostly in remote areas – had run out of diesel, while petrol outages were dwindling. National reserves stand at 39 days of petrol, 29 days of diesel and 30 days of jet fuel. Bowen urged motorists to buy only what they needed and not to cancel family road trips or domestic flights. The Albanese Government has already chartered 55 fuel tankers and temporarily cut the fuel-excise by 10 cents per litre from 1 April to smooth supply. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is monitoring pump prices daily and has issued substantiation notices to distributors imposing surcharges. The shortages have been most acute along long-haul freight corridors in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, affecting tour buses and logistics firms that service mining sites. So far, airlines have not altered schedules, but airport fuel companies have imposed 5 per cent allocation caps on discretionary (tank-over) uplift at Perth and Darwin. Mobility managers moving project teams to resources regions should build in contingency time and check refuelling arrangements for hire-car fleets. Longer-term, analysts warn that Australia’s 90 per cent reliance on imported refined product leaves business travel exposed to geopolitical shocks. The Government is accelerating the previously announced A$2 billion National Fuel Security Programme, which will subsidise extra domestic storage at Geelong and Kwinana and bring forward minimum-stockholding obligations for wholesalers by six months to 1 January 2027. Travellers heading out this weekend can find live outage maps on the Guardian’s fuel-tracker and should keep digital receipts; some insurers are waiving excesses on rental-car fuel surcharges attributable to force-majeure shortages.