Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong pose for a photo after signing a Joint Statement on Economic Resilience and Essential Supplies in Singapore, Apr. 10, 2026.
On April 19, Singapore’s Channel News Asia reported that Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam were in talks with Russia for the supply of crude oil, despite Russia’s war in Ukraine, given the disruption of supplies from the Middle East due to the U.S.-Iran conflict.
Despite this clear indication that Southeast Asia was short of oil for its own needs, the Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Foreign Minister Penny Wong, embarked on a mission to East and Southeast Asia to seek guarantees of supply for petrol, diesel, and fertilizer from some of the same countries. The results, as reported, were predictably embarrassing.
First, on April 22, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office stated that diesel shipments that were reported to be heading to Australia from Malaysia were not in fact from the country’s own supplies.
“The fuel that is being supplied to Australia is under a contract between Viva Energy and BP Australia, which was reflected in the media report,” it stated, as per New Straits Times. “It is described as being ‘from Malaysia’ because the vessel loads fuel stored in Malaysia.”
The PMO added, “The diesel does not originate from Malaysia’s natural resources.”
The PMO statement was issued in response to Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s assertion that he had secured 200 million litres of diesel from South Korea, and one shipment of diesel each from Brunei and Malaysia, following his discussions with Anwar Ibrahim and Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. Anwar does, by law, have complete control over national oil company Petronas, as well as Malaysia’s oil and gas industries, but tellingly, all Anwar did was to have discussions between the Australian Government and Petronas.
Prior to his meeting with Anwar, Albanese met with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, and both leaders agreed to ensure a continued flow of gas from Australia and petrol from Singapore. However, Singapore is not an oil and gas producer, and does not have a national oil company that it can command to guarantee or prioritize supplies. Singapore is and always has been an oil, gas, petrol and petrochemical trading hub, from which the world’s major oil and gas players, including Petronas, buy and sell products. That fact did not seem to be a factor in Albanese and later Penny Wong’s discussions in Singapore; there are no reports anywhere of meetings with the major oil players based in Singapore, except perhaps Vitol, which trades in Australia as Viva.
In any event, Singapore’s government has not been known to interfere with the oil majors’ trades, and it is very highly unlikely that Lawrence Wong is going to make an exception for Albanese. Indeed, the Singaporean leader promised Albanese that his government would not stop trading oil to Australia, but that was reported by Australian media as a guarantee of supply to Australia, attributable to Albanese’s diplomatic efforts.
Albanese then met with the Sultan of Brunei, but not (it appears) anyone from Brunei Shell Petroleum, which remains the Sultan’s primary partner in Brunei’s upstream and downstream oil sectors and markets oil extracted from Brunei.
Following Albanese’s tour of Southeast Asia, Penny Wong visited Japan, China and Korea, declaring ahead of her departure that “we are reliable suppliers. We want to continue to be reliable suppliers… to do that, we need to have diesel, we need to have jet fuel, we need to have petrol, and we need to have fertilizer too.”
Wong said that she would carry this message to Japan, China, and South Korea, adding that Australia could only fulfil its critical role as a major food, coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter in Asia if it had the fuel and fertilizer to keep its economy running.
As anyone who does business in Asia would know, declaring a weakness, no matter how well-intended, is never a strong bargaining point, and a supplier who admits that it will have difficulty supplying goods for whatever reason cannot be considered reliable, likewise, a supplier that needs the buyer to enable its business. China, Korea, and Japan can always look elsewhere for what Australia supplies, and already do so to some extent.
Importantly, all three countries have been active investors in Southeast Asia’s oil and gas sector for many years and rely on those investments for supplies. Recently, in order to protect that supply, Japan has established a $10 billion fund to help Asian and in particular Southeast Asian countries deal with the current oil crisis. Among others, the Japanese initiative was welcomed by the still very influential Ho Ching, the wife of former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and therein lies the lesson for Albanese and Penny Wong. Business in Asia respects cash; everything else is superfluous. If Australia wants to secure a supply of refined product from the region, it will have to pay for long-term investments in oil and gas fields (as it used to), and downstream infrastructure like higher Nelson Complexity Index (NCI) refineries, so that the range of crudes that can be turned into fuel products is broadened.
Having said that, it should be noted that Albanese and Penny Wong, and their civil service advisers, appear ignorant of the fact that India’s Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar refinery has an NCI of 21.1, the highest of any single-site refinery in the world, and processes 216 different grades of crude. On top of that, 65–70 percent of India’s crude imports come from non-West Asian sources, with roughly 70 percent arriving via routes other than the Strait of Hormuz. Reliance’s products are sold to traders in Singapore, and from there into the Australian market. It does trade in Russian crude, but that does not seem to have led to any serious objection from the Albanese government, even before the current Middle East conflict. Despite the crucial role India and Reliance play in the supply of this region’s supply of refined crude products, Albanese and Penny Wong seem to have made no effort at all to call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Reliance in order to secure supplies.
The Australian government has gone looking for oil in East and Southeast Asia with little or no understanding of the regional trade in crude and petrol and where it actually comes from. That apparent ignorance has been compounded by a naive belief that crude oil and refined products can be shared like sugar over the fence between neighbors.
Malaysian, Korean, and Japanese companies, among others, have invested billions in Australia to secure their LNG supplies, and they would expect Australia to do the same in Asia if it wants a guarantee of supply. A jointly owned high NCI refinery located in Southeast Asia to feed that market and Australia might be one option.
Having crude refined in Asia will still leave Australia vulnerable to disruption of supplies, but the risk can be mitigated by building storage in Western Australia, so that refined products can be shipped into storage in Australia as quickly as possible. Naturally, Australia would also be expected to mine its own oil and gas reserves and add to the sources of available supply in this region, and in that regard, at least Albanese showed some understanding of the realities when he told Lawrence Wong that “additional fields are going to come online” if Singapore requires more LNG.
