Why Your Weekly Petrol Price Report Card Is About to Vanish

Every Friday since March, the ACCC has published a document telling you exactly what petrol and diesel did in your capital city and across more than 190 regional locations over the previous seven days. Crude oil, refined benchmarks, wholesale prices, retail prices, retailer margins. On 30 September, those weekly reports stop. The next one lands roughly three months later.

There was no press conference. The expiry date was written into an amendment to a Ministerial Direction published back on 1 May, and it has been quietly ticking down ever since while the country argued about the excise.

How we ended up with a weekly report card

The ACCC has monitored fuel prices for years, but the normal rhythm is quarterly. That framework was renewed on 18 December 2025, when a direction extended petroleum monitoring for another five years from 1 January 2026. A report every three months, published well after the quarter it covers.

Then the Middle East conflict hit in late February and the bowser went silly. On 11 March the ACCC announced it was pulling fuel retailers into meetings to explain their pricing, giving the major companies an end of day deadline to hand over information, and publishing weekly updates so the public could watch in something close to real time. Commissioner Anna Brakey was blunt: "We will take action against any case of misleading consumers about the reason for steep price increases." The commission also backed lifting maximum penalties for breaches from $50 million to $100 million.

On 1 May the weekly cadence was written into the direction properly, with a use by date attached. Weekly reports until 30 September. Nothing beyond that.

What you actually lose

Fair to say the price data itself isn't going anywhere. What disappears is the analysis.

The weekly reports cover unleaded petrol prices, diesel prices and LPG across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, plus those 190 plus regional towns, and they do something no fuel app does. They put the retail price next to the wholesale price and show you the gap. That gap, the gross retail margin, is the difference between "prices went up because oil went up" and "prices went up because they could".

The 28 August edition is a decent illustration. Average retail petrol across the five largest cities sat 52 cents a litre below where it was on 31 March, and diesel was down 72 cents. Cheering, until you read the other line. Compared with 20 February, before the conflict, petrol was still 35 cents dearer and diesel a whopping 74 cents dearer. The commission also noted that price rises in most locations have been smaller than the excise change itself, which is the sort of finding that only means something if somebody is checking every week.

Quarterly reporting can't do that job. A report published in December covering October, November and December is history. Useful history, but you can't take it to the servo.

The name at the bottom of the 2007 paperwork

Worth a quick look back. Formal petrol monitoring in this country traces to December 2007, when the ACCC handed down its inquiry into unleaded petrol prices and the Assistant Treasurer of the day directed the commission to monitor prices and report annually. That same minister set up the Petrol Commissioner role. His name was Chris Bowen. Nineteen years later he is the energy minister fronting the fuel supply updates. Not many careers loop back that neatly.

Meanwhile, the Poms went the other way

Compared with Britain, we are heading in reverse. Under the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025, every filling station in the UK has been legally required since 2 February this year to report any pump price change to a central government database within 30 minutes. From 1 May the CMA can fine sites that don't comply, and the penalties are not symbolic: up to 1 per cent of worldwide turnover, with daily fines on top.

Here's the clever part. The British government didn't build an app. It made the raw data open and let comparison sites, mapping services and in car navigation do the rest. Regulate the feed, let everyone else build the front end.

We already invented the fix. It lives in Perth.

What most people don't realise is Australia has been running one of the world's best examples of this since January 2001. The FuelWatch scheme, backed by the Petroleum Products Pricing Act, requires every WA retailer to notify tomorrow's price by 2pm, publishes it at 2:30pm, then locks it in from 6am for a full 24 hours. Put the price up mid afternoon because a queue formed? Can't be done. Western Australia motorists effectively get tomorrow's prices today.

The scheme got tougher at the end of April. Reporting became compulsory for every remaining outlet in the state, another 203 sites, supply outages must now be reported rather than flagged voluntarily, and the fine for non compliance went from $1,000 to $4,000. Consumer Protection had already issued 78 infringements since the conflict began, 33 of them under the higher penalty.

The Northern Territory liked it enough to copy it. Since 25 April, Darwin and Territory retailers have had to report prices between 8:30am and 2pm for the following day, published at 2:30pm and effective from 6am, and they cannot raise that price for 24 hours, although they are free to drop it. Corporations face fines up to $94,500. The mechanics of the NT price lock are worth understanding if you fill up in the Territory.

The rest of the country sits somewhere in between. NSW and Queensland require servos to report a price change within 30 minutes, while Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania run their own official feeds. So the daily numbers keep flowing regardless of what the ACCC does from October. It's the national scorekeeping that thins out.

What it means at the bowser

Three practical things.

Nothing changes on your next fill. Prices keep updating through the state feeds and the apps that read them, including this one.

You do lose the umpire's weekly report. From October, if margins widen quietly in your city, nobody publishes that until well after the fact. The independent check that made retailers so uncomfortable back in March is the exact thing being switched off, right as the market settles after full excise restoration in August. Odd timing, that.

Which puts more weight on the tools you can drive yourself. Watching your city's price trends across a few weeks tells you whether your local market is tracking crude or quietly drifting, and knowing where you sit in the cycle matters more when nobody is marking the homework. If you're in a cycle city, best time to fill up does the boring arithmetic for you.

Where this goes

A direction can be amended. It took one amendment on 1 May to flip monitoring from quarterly to weekly, and it would take exactly one more to flip it back. If crude spikes again in October, expect that pressure to arrive fast.

The bigger question is whether Australia ever does what Britain just did and mandates a single national price feed, rather than eight jurisdictions with eight sets of rules and a federal regulator publishing reports about the aftermath. The working model has been sitting in Perth for 25 years. Nobody has picked it up.

Worth remembering

Keep an eye on whether that direction gets amended again. If the weekly reports come back, it will be because prices gave somebody in Canberra a fright.