General News
24 March, 2026
Fuel costs a ‘compounding mess’ for Shire Council
Mareeba Shire Council and the community are facing a “compounding mess” of fuel prices “going through the roof”, bitumen costs rising by 50%, farmers letting their crops rot, and council digging into its financial reserves to pay for current projects, under the increasing impacts of the current war against Iran.
“There is a huge amount of pressure on the community, and we’re hitting really difficult times. I see this as worse than Covid,” the council’s chief executive officer, Peter Franks, told councillors last week.
Responding to a question from Cr Amy Braes during Business Without Notice at its monthly meeting last week, Mr Franks painted a grim future in the coming months, and outlined what had already begun.
“We’ve seen just over a 40% increase in the price of fuel in the last two weeks, and reports are that it is going to get worse,” Mr Franks said.
In Atherton, a local farmer told his council he was charged “north of $2.80 a litre” for a farm diesel delivery on Thursday.
Mr Franks said the council used a “considerable amount of fuel” in day-to-day operations as well as in plant hire. With the latter, the council usually had a cost revision review once a year but was now going to have to hold monthly meetings given the changing prices of fuel.
Together with the rise in the cost of bitumen, which council had been told would be up by 50 %, “we’re going to have to scale back the level of work we’re doing under our current budget”, Mr Franks said.
Council staff were already struggling under current inflation to build a budget to bring to council for consideration for the coming year, he continued, but the current situation was “going to make it a lot worse”.
“We’ve got a number of contracts which we’ve already let to do work, and those contractors are going to be coming back to us because their expenses are going through the roof,” he said.
“So our contingencies potentially aren’t enough; we might have to start digging into reserves to finish the jobs we’re currently doing. This is of major concern.”
Mr Franks told the meeting the community was also facing “difficult times”.
“They’re feeling the same impacts - fuel prices are going through the roof, the RBA put up the rate again yesterday,” he said.
“Even if the conflict was resolved, reports say it would take between six and eight weeks for fuel supplies to start running again.
“And we also know once the prices do start falling, they’re not going to go back to where they were.”
Speaking after the meeting, Mr Franks said another real concern was if remote areas were cut off. Regional farmers already faced small margins, and costs for transporting their produce would be immense.
“Farmers are going to be letting their crops rot because they can’t afford to ship them. Then there are going to be shortages in the supermarkets, and what is there will go up in price,” he said.
“It’s just a compounding mess. And we don’t know when it’s going to be resolved.”
