Thread: The Real Price of Fuel

Over the weekend, I had cause to think about the price of fuel and our perceptions that we are paying more than ever. To scratch this itch I decided to do a little analysis of fuel prices, which resulted in the following graph.

Firstly the blue line details the average price per litre I have paid for unleaded since 1988. The figures were sourced from spreadsheets I kept for the cars I've owned over the period in SA, NSW and WA, with the 3 year gap, in the early 90's, due to living in PNG. My general buying pattern is to fill up on the cheapest day of the week and use a supermarket discount voucher (which will add a slight downwards bias to the last 10 years or so).

The Red line is the average price paid adjusted for inflation (ie what you would have to pay today for that litre purchased XX years ago). I used the Reserve Bank inflation calculator on the web to determine these figures.

The Green line is the percentage of the average weekly wage required to buy 100L of unleaded at the time. For calculate this I divided the historical cost of 100l by the average total full time adult weekly wage, as reported in November each year by the Bureau of Statistics.



No surprises looking at the graph that the raw $ price has more than doubled. However removing the effect of inflation, results in only a modest price increase, ≈ 15% over 27 years.

As to the percentage of our wage we spend on 100l of fuel it has dropped slightly from around 11% of average weekly income in the late 80's to ≈ 9% today.

So even though I grump about the price when I fill up it's not so bad really.

Cheers

Steve

Originally Posted by JDNSW

What would be interesting would be to extend it back beyond recent history. I suspect that the picture may look quite different if covering, for example, back to the end of WW2. Prices really did have a major jump and in stay that way until fairly recently in 1973.

Indeed it would be an interesting comparison John. Ony problem is getting the fuel prices. The best I could find in a quick google was Brisbane prices going back to 1986, which wasn't much better than my data. Average weekly wage and inflation stats go a lot further back.

Now off to google all these cryptic abbreviations

Cheers

Steve