After almost a decade in the trucking industry, Madilyn Lostroh says having fuel stolen from one of her vehicles for the first time came as a “bit of a shock”.
A couple of weeks ago, one of her drivers filled up with diesel in the afternoon and parked the truck in the yard they share with other businesses. The next morning, he discovered there was less in the tank.
“It’s a bit of a reality check on just how dire [the situation is], or desperate people are at the minute,” says Lostroh, 35, who runs Mal’s Haulage with her husband in Ipswich, Queensland.
“You have to have been there to know the yard is there – that’s the other worrying bit about it.”
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailLostroh is one of several people who have reported diesel being siphoned from vehicles or fuel being stolen from service stations after the energy shock caused by the war in the Middle East and subsequent soaring retail prices of diesel and petrol.
Average unleaded prices at service stations rose in some cities on Wednesday for the first time since late March, after a brief reprieve following the federal government’s cut to fuel excise.
Diesel wholesale prices on Wednesday morning leapt 20 cents to a new record of 320 cents a litre, Australian Institute of Petroleum data showed, with retail prices on average about 319 cents a litre around the country.
Lostroh said she hadn’t reported the fuel siphoning from one of her trucks as it appeared to have been a one-off incident, which she was trying to move forward from.
“Some people may not be able to put food on the table as well as they could before,” she said.
“The [Reserve Bank] is not being kind to us at the same time; there’s not much relief anywhere, and people are getting desperate.”
Alex Randall, the operations coordinator at the heavy haulage coordinator Loadshift, said he’d received other anecdotal reports of fuel theft and wasn’t surprised at all by them.
“When diesel’s over $3 a litre, and servos are rationing or running dry, fuel becomes something worth stealing,” he said.
“Our drivers are already planning routes around which servos might have stock. Now they’ve got to worry about what happens to the fuel sitting in their own yard overnight.”
Police data unclear
Despite anecdotal evidence of an increase in theft, any increase in the number of incidents of either fuel siphoning or people driving away from service stations without paying that have been reported to police appears patchy.
Queensland police on Wednesday said detectives were investigating several reports of fuel thefts and fuel drive-offs in the Cairns region in recent weeks. However, the force said there was no meaningful change – less than 1% – in reported thefts involving fuel from 1 January to 18 March, compared with the same period last year.
In Victoria, police have not seen much difference in reports of fuel siphoning from vehicles since the recent increase in petrol prices. Police said while there had been an increase in reports of fuel drive-offs from service stations, this coincided with the police enabling retailers to report online for the first time, so it was not clear whether there had been an actual increase in offending.
New South Wales police said they had reviewed data since January and found no obvious increase in fuel theft.
In the ACT, police said there had been a moderate increase in reported service station fuel drive-offs since the beginning of March, with 67 incidents reported, compared with 51 reports in February and 50 in January. The force said it was aware of a few anecdotal reports of fuel siphoning but could not immediately confirm how many there had been.
Similarly, in Tasmania, police said there was no simple way to capture data on siphoning, but there did not seem to have been a significant upward trend in fuel thefts from farms or storage depots.
However, there did appear to have been an uptick in fuel drive-offs from petrol stations. Twenty-four were reported to Tasmania police last week, compared with only three in the first week of February.
Additionally, police have been investigating what they allege was the theft on 27 March of a “significant quantity of diesel” from a storage trailer parked on a non-farming rural property near Oatlands, north of Hobart.
In South Australia, police said in the week ending 5 April, there had been 131 alleged fuel theft offences across the state, slightly down from 141 the previous week.
“Police have been in discussion with fuel retailers for many, many years on the issue of petrol theft, urging them to take proactive action to prevent it,” a spokesperson said.
Western Australia police said it was unable to provide specific fuel theft data because reports were investigated as general stealing offences by local police. The Northern Territory police were contacted for comment, but did not respond before publication.
