The petrol pump used to be a pit stop on the road to somewhere, a joyous Sunday drive. Now it’s a place to part with a huge lump sum. For years we just pressed the nozzle and out it came, now it’s scarce and pricey like liquid gold. So now we are forced to make hard decisions in where and how often we drive.

At $1.60 per litre we make decisions on the basis of driving distance. “I’m sorry Mum, we won’t be driving down to the Gold Coast to see you this weekend, maybe next weekend”. At $1.70 we begin to relax our fear of paedophiles and allow the children to walk or ride their bikes to school. It’s good exercise anyway, we tell ourselves. We’re also fighting obesity, we say. Maybe there’s some good to come out of all this.

At $1.80 a litre we organise carpooling with the neighbours for trips to the supermarket or the hardware. We even get to know their names and start talking over the side fence as in the old days. We suddenly have more in common with our neighbours and carpool our kids to sports events and outings. The 4WD is advertised in the classifieds, going cheap, with low miles on the clock. We still don’t know why we bought such a lumbering great mass of metal. It was probably because the neighbours had one.

At $1.90 a litre we walk to the bus stop and the station, downgrading the obesity epidemic by 50 per cent. The plasma television comes into it’s own and home theatre installers are becoming instant millionaires. Movie theatres sit like relics in a ghost town, covered in cobwebs. They did themselves no favours anyway when they banned the patrons from bringing their own refreshments from outside.

At $2.0 a litre cars are just a dim memory. Garages that once housed two cars are now snooker rooms and places for family get togethers. On Saturday nights whole streets gather at community BBQs and recollect how bad the road toll once was. Seven out of ten people now work at home and most families have a full-time Mum and Dad.