Housing Australia’s fuel reserves in US an ‘absolute joke’, former top defence bureaucrat says

Former defence department secretary Dennis Richardson has described the decision to house Australia's strategic fuel reserves in the US as "an absolute joke".

The former senior public servant and diplomat also told the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics and Sciences (Abares) Outlook conference in Canberra on Tuesday that Australia's freight network was vulnerable due to rail transport bottlenecks that had been highlighted during recent flooding.

Richardson condemned the Morrison government's decision in 2020 to house the stockpile of crude oil in the US.

"It's an absolute joke to have our national fuel stockpile being held in the United States," he said.

"That's a really important issue for us. It'll be interesting to see whether the defence strategic review conducted by [former Labor defence minister] Stephen Smith and [former defence chief] Angus Houston has addressed that issue. It certainly needs to be."

Richardson warned that nations had changed the way they were thinking about the global economy, in part due to escalating environmental pressures caused by the climate crisis.

Those challenges were becoming harder to address in a globally coordinated way as a result of the pressure on institutions like the UN, he added.