There is a person standing behind the counter at a South Australian service station right now. They did not set the fuel price. They did not close the refineries. They did not govern for thinness. They had nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz, the National Fuel Security Plan, or the particular administrative decisions that left this country with thirty days of diesel reserve and a Level 2 emergency declaration.
They are, however, the ones getting screamed at. And in some cases, the ones being docked pay when a customer drives off without paying.
That is where the farce has arrived. And it is worth examining exactly how it got there.
The Numbers
Drive-off fuel theft in South Australia increased by 36 per cent in a single week in mid-March — from 162 reported incidents to 221. SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens described it as a marked increase and noted that 97 of those incidents involved first-time offenders — people who, in his words, are starting to think about this as a way to deal with the increase in prices.
This is not surprising. NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics research established a strong correlation between higher petrol prices and increased fuel theft, estimating that for every 10 cent increase in the price of a litre of petrol, up to 120 extra incidents of service station fraud could be expected that month. The relationship between price spikes and theft is well documented. It was predictable. It was predicted.
SA drive-offs, week ending 15 March: 221 incidents — up from 162 the week before. A 36 per cent increase in seven days.
First-time offenders: 97 of those 221 incidents involved people with no prior record of the offence.
National pre-crisis baseline: Fuel theft was already costing retailers around $80 million a year before the Middle East conflict began.
National increase since conflict: The Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association reported theft had increased by between 8 and 30 per cent nationally.
In Western Australia, a service station attendant was injured attempting to stop a theft, resulting in a man being charged with stealing and dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm. Aggression toward workers is spiking alongside the theft rate.
The Police Response
Commissioner Stevens' response to the surge in drive-offs deserves careful reading. It is, in its way, a small masterpiece of institutional cost transfer.
Stevens said police would not prioritise the investigation of service station drive-offs. The ball, he said, was in the court of the retail fuel sector. Retailers should install pre-paid pumps. If the industry would not act, police resources would be directed elsewhere.
His analogy was instructive. If you continually leave your TV outside your house on the front verandah and it keeps getting stolen, there will come a point in time where we will tell you we're not taking that report anymore because you can stop that from happening.
The industry's response was immediate. The Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association said the comments could be perceived to be giving a green light to fuel theft and drive-offs. They noted that pre-paid pumps cost about $5,000 each, and any mandate would flow through to consumers in the price of fuel.
So the police decline to investigate. The industry declines to pay for prevention. And the consumer cannot afford the fuel that would need to become more expensive to fund the technology that would stop the theft that has increased because the fuel is already too expensive.
The Worker
Into this gap steps the person on shift.
Reports from South Australian service stations include workers being expected to cover the cost of drive-offs from their own wages. The SDA — the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association — has described the practice as completely outrageous and blatantly unlawful.
They are correct on both counts. Under the Fair Work Act, an employer cannot make a deduction from an employee's pay that is not authorised by the employee or required by law, and cannot make a deduction that is primarily for the employer's benefit. Making a worker pay for a customer's theft is the employer transferring a business loss onto the most financially exposed person in the chain. It is not a lawful deduction.
The SDA's report Under Pressure: the hidden cost of retail surveyed more than 11,000 retail workers and found 77 per cent were at high risk of harm, 72 per cent reported experiencing burnout, and 58 per cent reported very low levels of wellbeing. That was before the fuel crisis added drive-off liability and customer aggression to the existing load.
The Transfer
Step back and look at the full chain.
Canberra governed for thinness. Refinery capacity shrank. Import dependence deepened. Strategic reserves remained inadequate.
The Middle East conflict disrupted global supply. Prices spiked. The system proved brittle exactly as its critics said it would.
The government declared a Level 2 emergency and halved the fuel excise at a budget cost of $2.55 billion.
Prices remained elevated. Customers could not afford to fill their tanks.
Some chose to drive off without paying.
Police announced they would deprioritise investigating those thefts.
Employers, in some cases, passed the cost of those thefts to the workers on shift.
The worker at the bottom of that chain had no role in any decision above them. They did not design the fuel security architecture. They did not close the refineries. They did not set the price at the bowser. They cannot investigate the theft. They cannot install a pre-paid pump.
They are simply the last person standing when the cost needs somewhere to land.
This is not an isolated employment dispute. It is the full logic of the crisis expressed in miniature.
The Pattern
This country has a reliable habit of distributing the cost of institutional failure downward until it finds the person least equipped to absorb it.
When the market is humming, the profits stay where the decisions were made. When the system cracks, the cost travels. It moves away from the boardroom, away from the ministry, away from the regulator, away from the commissioner's press conference, and it lands on the person who is least able to push back, least likely to make the news, and most likely to simply absorb it as a condition of keeping their job.
The service station worker being docked for a drive-off they couldn't prevent is not an aberration. They are the endpoint of a very long chain of decisions made by people who will not feel the consequences.
Canberra hollowed out fuel security over years. The system cracked under pressure. The excise was cut. The police deprioritised. The employer deducted.
And the person on shift at a servo in suburban Adelaide stood at the counter and copped it.
The farce gets worse the further down the chain you look.
And the people at the bottom of the chain didn't design it.