00:00Righto, so I'm beaming in from my house in Scotland. As you can see behind me,
00:03I've nearly fell down the hill there. But I want to talk a little bit about the fuel excise cut
00:09that the government's putting in place. So for the next three months, 26 cents per litre will
00:14come off of fuel. For many people that might think that's a good idea because fuel prices
00:18become cheaper. That's not the problem we're facing at the moment. The problem we're facing
00:22is potential supply issues. And we've seen over the last couple of weeks, service stations,
00:27petrol stations around the country run out of fuel because people are buying more. The problem
00:33is if we reduce the price and suddenly everyone gets a 26 cents a litre saving, what are they
00:41going to do? They're going to fill up their tanks, fill up their jerry cans. And that's
00:45the key problem is that it creates additional demand. So we could actually find that 26 could
00:51be sucked away quite quickly by the market just buying too much petrol because they're
00:58thinking we're getting a bargain and the Iran war's not over. We've seen various attacks
01:03overnight in Kuwaiti vessels in Dubai. The concerns are still there. So we could actually
01:08cause a spike in demand, which causes further problems to the supply. I'm not convinced that
01:13this fuel duty cut is going to be good for us in the long term. What we actually need,
01:19and this sounds really bad, we need demand destruction. And the way you get demand destruction
01:24is by increasing prices to the point where people are not using fuel unless it's necessary.
01:30As farmers, we clearly need fuel and it's a necessary product, but we need things like people
01:35not going a 300km trip for their Easter holiday because it's not necessary. And demand destruction
01:42destruction is caused by high prices and lowering prices instills a little bit more consumption
01:49into the marketplace. So I don't think it's a great decision from the government.
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