Big problems, simple answers.

April 2, 2026
Updated July 2, 2026

American journalist H L Menken is often quoted as saying "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". (He actually said "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong". The meaning doesn't change.)

There is also the Dunning-Kruger Effect - where people assume they have a much greater expertise in and knowledge of something than they actually have.

Both of these phenomena have been amply exhibited by two events affecting this part of the world right now - the closure of Victoria Pass and the price and availability of fuel following events in Iran.

Victoria Pass

Victoria Pass has brought out the civil engineers and the quantity surveyors. The knee jerk reaction has been "Build a tunnel". Within days of the road closure I was offered two different tunnel proposals - Emu Plains to Hartley and Springwood to Hartley. The longest road tunnel in NSW is Northconnex between West Pennant Hills and Wahroongah. It is nine kilometres long and cost just under four billion dollars. The ends are at approximately the same elevation and the geology didn't present a problem. Hartley is 790 metres above Emu Plains and 420 metres above Springwood, so any tunnels would have to well exceed the straight line distance (the ends of Northconnex are seven kilometres apart but required nine kilometres of tunnel).

Both tunnel ideas I was given would require tunnels of more than 30 kilometres, and as they would be up to 500 metres below ground level they would be almost impossible to ventilate. There is a reason that very long tunnels in Europe such as the Channel Tunnel and the Gothardt Base Tunnel transport cars and trucks inside electric trains.

Also, both ideas would seriously damage the tourist trade in the Blue Mountains by totally bypassing Katoomba and the other major tourist spots. Traffic for this, as well as truck deliveries and commuter traffic would still have to use the Great Western Highway.

One ludicrous suggestion that can be dismissed immediately was someone claiming that Elon Musk could put a tunnel from Emu Plains to Lithgow for $70 million. Leaving aside the fact that the geological survey would cost more than that, so far Musk appears to have only constructed a couple of kilometres of tunnels under Las Vegas and to use them you have to sit in a Tesla car. It's a sort of underground tram with very small carriages, but fanbois gotta fanboi.

We might get a tunnel one day (year? century? millennium?) but it wont be here before Victoria Pass gets fixed well enough to be used again.

The next idea is to build a bridge to bypass the damaged piece of road. One "firm estimate" off the back of some amateur expert's envelope is $130 million, but this is just a guess without a lot more work on where the foundations would go. The new road at Hartley cost $232 million and that was built across virtually flat country. Then there's the suggestion to reroute the Great Western Highway from Blackheath to Hartley by going around to the north of Mount York. Have I mentioned how much the Hartley road to nowhere cost?

Again, the road will be open well before anyone fires up structural design or project management software to plan any bridges.

One idea might have possibility (but the proposer showed their complete ignorance) is to drill down into the rocks and fill below the causeway and fill any voids with concrete. The proposer used the words "reinforced concrete", but this means concrete with a reinforcing steel framework inside it. You don't pump reinforced concrete anywhere. What is possible is to pump in a slurry of water and cement, but this will only be a temporary fix until something better can be arranged.

The fuel crisis

This has brought out the economists, geologists, oil extraction experts, chemical engineers and bulk transport specialists.

As fuel prices have been rising there have been suggestions that the government should drop the fuel excise tax. A price reduction like that would accelerate demand (when the problem is a supply shortage) and cost the budget billions. One smart climate change denier has suggested that cancelling any subsidies for electric vehicles would pay for the drop in excise income, but the problem of making something cheaper when there's a supply disruption remains.

(As this was being written the government announced a three-month, 50% reduction in fuel excise. Watch the queues at the pumps as everyone fills up. Real economists warned that this could lead to inflation and interest rate rises, add to the budget deficit and, of course, raise demand in a time of short supply.)

Apparently there are enormous reserves of oil under Australia just waiting for someone to drill some holes. Yes, we have large amounts of gas but the oil is a different matter. The sort of oil under the continent can't be refined at either of the country's two refineries so would have to be shipped to Singapore for refining and then brought back. This would require spending billions of dollars to create an export facility plus possibly buying some tankers. That would be after spending more billions on the extraction and local transport. If anyone could make a profit extracting oil in Australia they would be doing it, but sucking it up at maybe $300 a barrel doesn't make any sense.

So why not build more refineries in Australia? Because the amount of oil under here doesn't justify the cost. Oil refineries are immensely complicated chemical factories and cost a lot of money to build and run. Amortising the cost of extraction, transport and local refining would make people laugh at how cheap petrol and diesel are today or get to when Middle East oil hits $150 a barrel.

You don't create oil fields or refineries overnight and unless the current Middle East disruption continues for longer than the war in Afghanistan did, things will be back to almost normal before the first hole could be drilled of the first shovel hits the ground for infrastructure.

Despite what the naysayers are saying right now, Australia is still in a relatively comfortable position. Fuel is still getting here from Singapore, Korea and other places. It will get more expensive as the refiners get charged more for crude, but we've been there before and survived. I remember when permissible petrol buying days depended on the last digit of your number plate. And that was when we had a lot more refineries than the two we have now.

So what can we do?

All we can really do about Victoria Pass is wait and complain. Yes, it's a disgrace that transport across the Blue Mountains depends on a road made in the 1830s but fixing it will take a lot less time than building an alternative. I've seen some suggestions of alternative ways to drive to Oberon from Sydney, but going via Yass and Boorowa, Goulburn and Taralga or Dunedoo and Dubbo are probably not going to look too attractive.

A temporary fix will happen, and then we can get back to arguing about where the ends of the tunnel should be.

And for the fuel crisis - drive less, and only when necessary, don't hoard fuel (it has a much shorter storage life than toilet paper) and consider others. The fuel is still getting across the mountains but farmers and truck fleets need diesel a lot more than your RAM that you use to drive the kids to school. And be polite to the workers in service stations - the price rises aren't their fault.

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