Fuel rationing may be necessary to ensure Australians have enough food as the Russia Ukraine crisis drags on, the Victorian Farmers Federation says.
Speaking on Flow, VFF president Emma Germano said city cousins might need to do their part to save fuel so they have enough food to eat:
"There's been some talk around removing the fuel excise tax on behalf of everybody and I think that that's a dangerous place for us to get to because ultimately what we also need is for people to ration fuel in their own lives."
"We need those key infrastructure spends on public transport and things like that so we're not car pulling and incentivising the community to actually reduce their use of fuel."
Hear Emma Germano's chat with Flow on the podcast player below:
On Thursday the VFF confirmed it wanted the fuel excise to continue on the federal budget trajectory that 100 per cent of the excise raised was spent on land transport projects.
The RAA of SA's Charles Mountain indicated on Flow that percentage had slumped to 40 per cent in 2012-13 - during the Rudd Labor era.
Ms Germano also expressed concern about fuel reserve storage in Australia:
''We know that the strategic reserve of fuel for Australia is actually located in the US and it would take 3-4 weeks to actually get it here to Australia if we needed it.''
''You don't have to be that politically engaged to see that the world is changing and those sorts of contingency plans, that sort of thinking, needs to be applied to us now...we cannot sleep-walk into a disaster just because of poor planning.''
''We're calling on the federal government to look at bringing that supply on shore as soon as possible''
NSW Liberal senator Jim Molan recently told Flow Australia had ample fuel stored within Australian territory - underground, crude and unrefined but complained state governments refused to allow it to be extracted and refined on-shore.