Brent Bultitude:
Adam Creighton, senior fellow at the IPA, economist, commentator at The Australian is on the line as he usually is each and every Thursday morning. Looking forward to my chat with Adam. Good morning, Adam, how are you?
Adam Creighton:
Good morning. Thanks for having me as usual.
Brent Bultitude:
It’s a pleasure. Chris is crooked today, so you’re stuck with me, mate.
Adam Creighton:
That’s all right. I thought it’d be just as good.
Brent Bultitude:
The fuel crisis, the fuel crisis, the fuel crisis. Anthony Albanese is going to hold another national cabinet meeting on Monday. We just had a caller saying, “Why don’t they hold the meeting today? They should have held it yesterday.” He’s changed his mind about who should lead the response, not the states, he says at last. Is he going to stand up, he and Mr. Bowen, you think, and finally do something about this, Adam?
Adam Creighton:
Well, look, I think it gets down to politics. I don’t think Chris Bowen himself, who’s already unpopular, wants to be the minister that formally calls in rationing. I think he wants the state premiers to do it, so they wear the pain, which I think is pretty gutless and weak because I think with something like this it’s clearly a national issue and needs to be coordinated nationally to ensure the areas that are most starved of fuel are the ones that get it. That would largely be the regional areas where there’s no other options. There’s no trams or buses in these places, so people need to drive themselves. The whole country runs on diesel, obviously, so that’s obviously got to be the priority.
I suspect within a week we’ll have rationing of some sort at the federal level. I honestly don’t know why dragging the chain. There was a modest improvement yesterday, apparently, a number of stations that don’t have fuel, but it’s still in the hundreds. It’s still 10%, I believe, in New South Wales of stations now are shut. Those ones that are shut are obviously congregated outside the city areas. There’ll be very understandable angst in a lot of those seats. Maybe they don’t care that those seats tend not to vote labour. I don’t know. Maybe I’m too cynical.
Brent Bultitude:
Look, the ministers also sing from the same hymn sheet or hymn book literally, and the talking points have centred them each and every day. But this insistence that there’s plenty of fuel around and there’s no supply problem. As you have said, and we see it reported each and every night, the numbers are going up and down. There are stations that are running dry. It’s a huge problem. My concern is this. I don’t know. Mr. Bowen, talk about Mr. Bowen. Don’t you think that in weeks to come, if Bowen doesn’t start to ration fuel now, if he doesn’t stand up, Adam, and say, “Look, we’ve got to start rationing fuel,” if he leaves it for another couple of weeks and we get less and less and less supplies, it’s going to be a worse situation.
Don’t you think that the Australian public will come down on him like a lead balloon because he procrastinated for so long before they finally had the intestinal fortitude to stand up and make the decision?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. Look, I think they’ve got all the rhetorical backing they need. We just had some chap out this week from Paris, from the IEA saying this was a worse crisis than the 70s. You can certainly point to that and say, “We do have a crisis. We need to enact these powers.” I noticed yesterday, One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson was very forceful and strive, and she said it must be done immediately. She’s obviously hearing more from regional areas perhaps than Chris Bowen. Again, I think when they call it a crisis, the problem is it’s just going to be a reminder in the press and amongst informed people that this government, and in fairness to the previous government too, they have never kept enough fuel.
They’ve never kept the 90 days that is the standard for most Western countries. They’ve only had 35 days, and I think we’re down to 27 days or so now, certainly with jet fuel it’s even lower than that. Of course, people will panic and hoard. That’s the rational thing. I don’t like these people being dismissed as crazy or nuisances. If you know your government only has 30 days, of course, you’re going to get out there and get as much as you possibly can. If they had to have had 90 days, you wouldn’t have the same panic, but smart people and certainly people in the business, they know it’s 30 days, and that’s not a lot. We’ve only got two oil refineries left that function in the whole country.
We’re completely reliant more or less on bringing in refined oil from Asia. I did laugh this week about supposed that we have this deal with Singapore, apparently. Look, I can assure you, Singapore’s first priority will be Singapore.
Brent Bultitude:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Adam Creighton:
If there’s any leftover, okay, maybe they’ll send it to Australia. But these countries are going to look after themselves. Just like you saw in COVID, when it comes to a crisis like this, it’s every man for himself.
Brent Bultitude:
What’s your take on the overnight stories of what’s going on with Iran? We’ve heard this for the last 24 or 48 hours. Now we see in the paper that Iran is flatly refusing to negotiate with the United States, despite what Washington is insisting. They’re saying that the negotiations are still alive, but Iran is saying they’ve knocked back this reported 15-point US peace plan. They’ve apparently come back with their own demands, including they want control over the Straight of Hormuz. Tehran is effectively saying the war ends on their terms and not anyone else’s, which is a complete conflict, the complete opposite of what the White House is talking tough about.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. No, look, it’s pretty disappointing and concerning. I thought that would probably happen. Both governments want to save face. The one point to make is the news reporting we get about the war, and it’s no fault of the journalists, but obviously a lot of it comes from the US and it’s leaked out by US authorities. You tend to get the impression that things are going better perhaps than a more neutral reading of the news would indicate. The thing is, first casualty of war is truth, as you well know. Whenever that happens you’ve got to realise you’re basically reading propaganda, someone or someone else’s. It’s funny on social media trying to find an objective person, and it is very difficult, when there’s something like this.
People talk up their own side. Bottom line is, it’s very hard to know who really has the upper hand. Iran says it’s rejecting it. I think that’s pretty ballsy and it suggests to me that they’re probably a bit more powerful than at least the mainstream media has led people to believe. They’ve insisted in their fire flutes, that they want all the US bases out of the Middle East. Surely, that’s something the US cannot accept. But on the other hand, the 15 points that I skimmed seemed just far too Draconian on a country like Iran, which remember it’s got 90 million people. This is not Iraq. This is not Afghanistan. This is the most sophisticated, largest by population by far country in the Middle East that’s thousands and thousands of years old.
They have very high regard for themselves. Gosh, I noticed Trump was recently tweeting about the famed high IQ of the Iranian people. It is apparently statistically higher than anywhere else, I think almost to the world. The average is 106. They’re not stupid people. They’re very proud. There’s obviously a lot of internal dissent as we’ve seen with those protests, but it seems like the government is fully intact and they clearly have missiles that they’ve demonstrated that they can fire a great distance. Remember, you got to remember, the US government went in there and killed the Ayatollah and killed a lot of their leaders.
That would have caused a lot of disgruntlement, I would say, in my end. Imagine in the Australian situation, some foreign government comes here and wipes out elbow in the cabinet. Even if you didn’t like the Labour Party, you might be a bit pissed-off about that still.
Brent Bultitude:
Absolutely. What is happening now in America, I see that polls are coming out all the time, but even supporters of Trump are starting not to support him anymore because I think people want to have faith in their leaders. I think they’re losing faith that he’s able to bring this to a close.
Adam Creighton:
Well, I think domestic politics is probably driving it, something the Iranians do not have to worry about at all. The super seat’s basically a dictatorship, but Trump’s got the midterms coming up in November. The polls are looking dire. It even looks like the Democrats will win the Senate, which six months ago no one thought would occur. Of course, if they win the Senate and the lower House, then they can impeach Trump again. They almost certainly will. The last two years will be just all kind of law fair nonsense. It’ll make it very hard for the Trump Administration to do anything without some control of the Congress.
I think him, and you can imagine all the nervous backbenchers in the lower House of their parliament, their Congress getting very nervous, probably sending messages to the White House, just saying, “End this bloody thing now.” They don’t care about Trump’s pride. They just want to win their district when it comes up in November. Of course, it’s not hitting the US as hard as other countries, but they’ve got big price rises at the bowser too. That’s not popular with anyone. I don’t know. I’m not a war expert, but it hasn’t gone terribly, but it’s not gone brilliantly. What’s your impression of how it’s gone?
Brent Bultitude:
Look, my concern is I read an article yesterday about Iran and what Iran has done, like they’ve got close neighbours, the Gulf Coast cities that are close neighbours. What Iran has done in the last couple of weeks, they’re even starting to, pardon my French, piss-off their neighbours.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, they’ve really lashed out at the other Arab countries, which I think is a strange strategy. I researched a bit about the Middle East. I know a lot more than I did a couple years ago. The Arab nations are generally allied with the US. I’m talking Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and so on, but most of the people, like 95%, hate Israel with a passion, even if their governments are close to the US. They have to walk both sides a bit because they don’t want any revolutions at home, right? They can’t be seen to be helping Israel too much, but on the other hand, they do find Iran far too interventionists and all the terrorism they do is really not acceptable.
Iran, as you know, has fired missiles into some of the Emirates, which are not military powers. From Iran’s point of view, they’re firing the missiles at US bases, some of them miss and hit other things, but from its point of view, it’s the presence of the US there that’s the problem. From Iran’s point of view, they can’t say they’ve won unless the US agrees to some withdrawal of its bases or its troops. I find that pretty hard to believe that that will happen. Then on the other hand, the US wants Iran to insist that it can’t fire long missiles, basically. They have no missile. That’s not a flyer, I don’t think. I’m sure Iran will say, “We have no intention to build a nuclear weapon.”
But they’ve been saying that a very long time and still do. It’s hard to know. Remember, this is a huge country about, is it the size of Western Australia? Something like that. It’s very big and it’s very easy to hide things. It’s hard to know what they’re actually doing. Indeed it’s even hard to know. I watched all the experts argue about it, but it’s hard to know what stocks and missiles they even have left. We just don’t know. I think that uncertainty is a great problem. But yeah, look, I’ll see back to the original point. I was a bit shocked that Iran came out and just completely rejected them.
That suggests that they consider they’re in the strong spot, which is not what you’d get if you were reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. Like I say, who really knows, but it’s sad that it seems to be this is going to go on for a few more weeks. Also, that means for Australia, we’re going to have very expensive petrol for quite some time. We’re going to get higher inflation, higher interest rates, all of those things.
Brent Bultitude:
New South Wales, we’ll talk New South Wales now. New South Wales is in a constant state of protest. There’s a story in the telegraph today with more than 2,300 rallies, demonstrations and marches staged every single year, an average of more than six a day. Have they become pointless or just an inconvenience?
Adam Creighton:
I don’t know what marches they are. I guess this is the wonders of multi-culture. Everyone’s bringing over their gripes from overseas and taking to the streets. I assume these are political related marches. Sorry, I haven’t read the detailed story, but I assume they are political related marches largely. I think this in the media, reading about this, for ordinary Australians, this reminds them of why they should vote or they will vote One Nation because people, I think the ordinary Australians, 70% of us that were born here and, let’s be frank, don’t really care what’s going on in the Middle East or elsewhere, get fed up with these issues being front and centre of our own domestic politics.
When we’ve got so much more to be worrying about, frankly. I don’t want to put my economist hat on, but Australia’s in deep decline economically in many ways. Yet all we’re talking about now is this war in the Middle East.
Brent Bultitude:
Let’s talk about the ABC and their strike. A strike is the ABC is supposed to drive home the point. Well, the strike, I suppose, was to drive home the point by showing the public daily life can’t go on without them. I don’t think daily life was really affected for a lot of Australians when the ABC did go on strike. Your thoughts?
Adam Creighton:
Well, look, I don’t think they’ve been on strike quite a while. I’m not really an avid ABC watcher, so I haven’t actually noticed of any change in programming. I don’t have it on. But look, I’d say they can strike if they want. I don’t want to sound like a pro-ABC person, that would be outrageous, but they don’t get paid particularly well there, the journalists. But then, again, a lot of them are my friends, they have very good conditions. We always used to make fun of them when I worked at NewsCorp, which is of course a private sector media company.
We’d look at their conditions and the holidays and loo days and stuff with great envy because, of course, they don’t have to make a profit. They’re 1.1 billion a year handed over, which is a lot of money, a huge amount of money. That 1.1 billion probably is more than all the newsrooms of all the newspapers and all the commercial TV stations put together, I would say. I put a bit on that. They don’t do much with a lot, if you know what I mean. Whereas we, do a lot with little in the private media.
Brent Bultitude:
Well, we have to, don’t we, because there’s no option.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, that’s right. Exactly. We become very efficient. They’re not subject to the market forces that the rest of the media… Honestly, good luck to them, but I think it’s also a risk. They just highlight their relevance when they do this a bit because I don’t think people really care that much. 50 years ago, the ABC had a purpose when it was the only radio station far out all over the place. But now its intellectual purpose has gone really. One good thing Malcolm Turnbull always remember, he said, “The best argument for the ABC is that it exists.” Literally, that’s the only argument, that it’s there. There’s really not much of an argument for it anymore and they should really shut it down or privatise it or something like that. That’s my view.
Brent Bultitude:
You’ve got my vote. You have my vote. I have said that for ages. Before I let you go, let’s talk about the inflation figures out yesterday. Oh, dear. This is something that is not going to go away and it’s in fact only going to get worse. I think that the Treasury is now conceding that forecasts tipping inflation towards 5% off the back of rising oil prices, it might actually be conservative. We’re looking at maybe 7% more inflation.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, very interesting the fact Chalmers came out and said that these original five could be conservative, because that almost certainly means it’s going to be a lot worse than five because remember it’s not just petrol, it’s what it all feeds into. Diesel runs the country via transport, and if diesel’s gone up 50%, a lot of the food that’s transported around on those trucks, that’s going to go up too ultimately. It’s going to feed through to other prices. It is quite a worry. It’s a huge worry. This is getting a bit intellectual, but from the reserve bank’s point of view, they worry a lot about this thing called inflation expectations, which isn’t actually real inflation.
It’s what people think inflation will be. Once people start thinking that inflation’s four or five, it’s very hard to get that away. That’s the big fear, because ultimately, inflation is what people think it’s going to be, and so therefore they put their prices up. It’s a feedback from what people think it’s going to be, and that translates into what it is. The RBA now in their speeches and their comments, they’re very worried about this thing called inflation expectations. Now, they will say, so good economists will say, “Well, the oil price shock is not Australia’s fault and it’s not.” The reserve bank should ignore that part of the price increase.
But it gets back to your ordinary men in the street is not as sophisticated as that. They just see inflation 5% and so if you’re a business or whatever and you think, “Oh, well, I’ve got to put everything up 5% just to tread water.” That’s what will going to happen. Now, the hope is that this 5% is fleeting, but if this lasts for six months, they’d be very worried at mountain place because they’ll have no hope, although will have to. Actually, Michele Bullock said interestingly, I thought that was interesting. She said, “Well, we don’t want to have a recession, but if this gets out of hand, we’re going to have to have one.”
Of course, what she means by that is if it hangs around 5% for six months, they’re going to have to jack up the interest rates three or four times to basically crash the economy to get rid of it. That’s of course what happened in the 80s, there’s a famous recession we had to have, et cetera. We may be having another one.
Brent Bultitude:
Economists have said, some economists have said in the last 24 hours that what’s going on at the moment with increasing fuel prices, et cetera, and everything else going up as a result of the increase in fuel prices is like three interest rate rises, the equivalent to three interest rate rises. If you take that into consideration, Adam Creighton, do you think in five weeks time when the RBA meet they will increase rates again?
Adam Creighton:
Look, it’s 50-50, and you saw the vote last time as five, four, which was interesting, so it was split last time, but honestly, if it pushes through 5%, I don’t think they have any choice but to do another quarter, because otherwise it just looks weak. As I wrote recently, the RBA’s reputation is not great. I can’t remember the exact figures, but as you know, they have this target of between 2% and 3%, and over the past 10 years it’s been out of the target for seven years. It’s barely in their target. Do they really want another two years to go by where it’s not in the target? Once you reach that point, you’re like, “Well, what are you there for guys?”
You’ve got a hundred people learning and this huge box, sorry, more than 100, 3000, what am I saying? 3000 staff on huge money and you can’t even do your core mission. I think Michele realises that and she probably wants to be reappointed too. She’s not going to be reappointed in three years if inflation’s at 5%. Let me tell you that. I think short answer, yes.
Brent Bultitude:
Okay. I was just thinking if she’s not reappointed you can’t keep buying homes in Yamba and places like that, can you?
Adam Creighton:
I must say, I know Michelle, she’s a nice lady. She actually hired me when she was a junior manager back in 2002. I’ve known her the whole time and she’s a good country woman, no nonsense, but I was a bit shocked that she decided to do that on rates day, there’s nothing illegal about it, but it’s just a reminder of the haves and the have nots. It was their third investment property and I just don’t think it… It, I think, put a bad taste in people’s mouths.
Brent Bultitude:
We call it out of touch.
Adam Creighton:
Yes. Right.
Brent Bultitude:
Adam, always good to catch up with you. Thank you so much for your time this morning. Chris will be back next week and catch up with you then.
Adam Creighton:
Okay, great. Thanks for talking to me.
Brent Bultitude:
See you, mate. Bye-bye.
This transcript of Adam Creighton on Mornings 2SM from 26 March 2026 has been edited for clarity.
