Net Zero and the Slow Collapse of Australian Sovereignty

Blaming Donald Trump for Australia’s current weakness is lazy. He may be a disruptor in global markets, but he did not spend decades dismantling Australia’s domestic capacity. He did not close refineries here. He did not shrink our manufacturing base. He did not build a political culture that became comfortable importing what we once made, outsourcing what we once controlled, and calling dependence “efficiency”. Trump is not the author of Australia’s vulnerability. At most, he is a stress test exposing damage that was already done.

That is the conversation Australia keeps trying to avoid. When global instability bites, too many politicians and commentators reach for the easiest excuse. They point overseas. They blame the latest foreign shock. They blame Trump, war, shipping lanes, or markets. But none of those things explain why Australia is so exposed in the first place. The harder truth is that our own political class, over decades, has hollowed out the productive spine of the nation.

Australian sovereignty is not a slogan

Australian sovereignty is not measured by speeches, press conferences, or target dates. It is measured by capacity. It is measured by whether we can manufacture enough, refine enough, move enough, and produce enough food when the world becomes unstable.

Right now, the numbers tell a story of decline. The Reserve Bank’s latest snapshot shows manufacturing accounts for just 5.7 per cent of Australia’s output, while manufactured goods make up only 7.8 per cent of exports. Those are not the numbers of a deeply self-reliant country. They are the numbers of a country that has grown used to digging, shipping and importing rather than making.

Fuel tells the same story even more clearly. In March 2026, the federal government said Australia’s two remaining refineries at Geelong and Brisbane produced 12 billion litres of petrol, diesel and jet fuel in 2025, which was only about 20 per cent of annual national needs. The government itself described those two refineries as “critical” to energy security. That is not a sign of strength. It is an admission that sovereign refining capability has already been reduced to a narrow and fragile base.

Fuel insecurity is a sovereignty problem

Once you understand that, the present fuel anxiety looks very different. It is not just a short-term price problem. It is not just a bowser issue. It is not just a Trump problem. It is a sovereignty problem.

The ACCC has already had to move to weekly fuel monitoring during the current Middle Eastern conflict, and has granted urgent interim authorisation for major fuel participants to coordinate supply-chain responses. It has also reported that diesel price increases at both wholesale and retail levels have been outpacing petrol. When the market needs emergency-style monitoring, weekly public updates, and special competition-law authorisations just to manage supply stress, that is not resilience. That is exposure.

The government’s own Liquid Fuel Security Review makes the point even more bluntly. It states that diesel allows Australia to harvest and transport food around the country and keeps other essential industries going. It also states that, in a worst-case scenario where imports are disrupted, diesel is the fuel Australia has the lowest capacity to produce domestically. That should be setting off alarm bells across the entire food-producing economy.

Fuel rationing would hit commercial fishing hard

This is where the commercial fishing industry needs to be brought back into the discussion.

A lot of smaller owner-operator fishing businesses do not run on big-city assumptions. They do not always have large on-site storage, dedicated supply contracts, or the negotiating power of major operators. In many cases, they fuel their boats the practical way: they take diesel drums to the local service station and keep the business moving that way.

That matters because the Commonwealth’s own retail rationing guidance says that in a national liquid fuel emergency, all fuel consumers would be subject to retail rationing unless they are designated essential users. The same guidance states that under the current rationing restrictions it is only possible to obtain fuel from service stations for vehicles with fitted tanks, and that customers cannot fill containers at a service station and then transport that fuel elsewhere for use.

For small commercial fishing businesses, that is not some technical side note buried in a policy paper. That is potentially the difference between operating and not operating. If a fisher cannot lawfully fill drums at the local servo to fuel the boat, then that business can be shut down by the rationing architecture before anyone in Canberra even says the word “seafood”.

The same guidance also says the retail rationing scheme is built around a maximum transaction value per vehicle per day. Again, that framework may make bureaucratic sense on paper, but it is clearly designed around ordinary road use, not the operational reality of small marine businesses trying to fuel working vessels.

Small operators wear the burden first

This is where scale bias enters the picture. In a fuel emergency, not everyone is hit equally.

The Liquid Fuel Security Review says fuel wholesalers use contracts to manage supply disruptions, and that for those without contracts it is very hard to access supply. It adds that this impacts users differently, because big industries with predictable usage are more likely to have contracts, while other users are less likely to have that protection. In a disruption, those with contracts are likely to get priority access, and that access may not reflect the real economic and social needs at the time.

That logic should sound very familiar to commercial fishing. The large player with storage, formal contracts and deeper capital has a buffer. The smaller operator relying on local access and retail workarounds does not. So a fuel emergency does not just create scarcity. It amplifies structural inequality. It rewards scale and punishes the operator who is already closest to the productive edge.

That is not a neutral system. It is a system that quietly decides who gets to keep producing and who does not.

Commercial fishing is part of food security

This matters because commercial fishing is not some discretionary hobby sitting outside the real economy. It is food production.

ABARES states that the economic costs of operating a fishery include fuel alongside crew, repairs, management, depreciation and labour. Fuel is not incidental to the fishing industry. It is a core operating input. If fuel access is disrupted, fishing activity is disrupted. If fishing activity is disrupted, seafood supply is disrupted.

At the same time, the federal government is now developing Feeding Australia: A National Food Security Strategy, explicitly acknowledging that while Australia is a food-secure nation, the food system is facing a range of challenges. The strategy is being developed with farmers and fishers, industry and the community, which is itself an admission that food security can no longer be treated as something that simply takes care of itself.

So here is the contradiction. Governments say food security matters. They say resilience matters. They say fishers matter. But the policy settings around fuel security are still built in ways that can hit small commercial fishers especially hard. A country cannot talk endlessly about resilience while leaving parts of its domestic food-producing base exposed to blunt rationing systems, thin refining capacity, and a fuel market that favours the contract-rich over the locally productive.

Net zero without capacity is managed decline

This is where net zero has to be confronted honestly.

Australia has a legislated target of net zero emissions by 2050. It has also set a 2035 target to reduce emissions by 62 to 70 per cent below 2005 levels, and the government says the Net Zero Plan provides the framework for a fair, orderly and efficient transition across the economy.

The issue is not whether emissions matter. The issue is whether a country can pursue an economy-wide transition agenda while simultaneously neglecting the hard physical foundations of sovereignty. Because that is what Australia has done. We have spent years talking about transition, targets, frameworks and future industries while allowing present-tense capacity in refining, manufacturing and supply security to become dangerously thin.

Net zero did not create all of these weaknesses. But it has sat comfortably beside them. It has become part of a governing culture that treats domestic productive capacity as secondary to compliance architecture, symbolic ambition and imported optimism. The result is a nation that talks like a strategic player while behaving like a dependent customer.

And in commercial fishing, that contradiction becomes painfully concrete. Fishers are told they are part of a secure domestic food system. Yet many rely on diesel with no practical substitute. They are told resilience matters. Yet small operators may be among the first squeezed by fuel restrictions. They are told Australia is planning for the future. Yet the present system is still vulnerable to the point where the simple act of filling diesel drums at a local service station could become a regulatory dead end.

The problem was built here

So no, Donald Trump is not the explanation for Australia’s predicament. He is just the latest excuse.

The real story is that Australian politicians, of different parties and over many years, allowed the country’s productive capacity to weaken. They allowed refining to become precarious. They accepted the long erosion of manufacturing. They became comfortable with imported dependence. They treated sovereign capability as old-fashioned right up until the moment a global shock made it unavoidable again.

Commercial fishing understands this better than most because it still lives in the real economy. It knows that sovereignty is not abstract. It is diesel in the tank. It is a boat leaving the ramp. It is domestic seafood landing on Australian plates. It is the ability to keep producing when the wider system is under pressure.

If Australia wants to talk seriously about Australian sovereignty, it needs to stop blaming the nearest foreign villain and start confronting the bipartisan policy failure at home. Because a country that cannot reliably manufacture enough, refine enough, or protect the fuel access of its own food producers is not moving toward strength.

It is managing decline.