The rise of people power in the fight for fairer petrol prices

The NSW town of Young is the latest to heed the NRMA’s call and take the fight to the fuel companies with 'people power'.

Young is situated in the South West Slopes region of NSW two hours west of Canberra and is known as the Cherry Capital of Australia, but there’s nothing sweet about the 133.5cpl average price of petrol locals are forced to pay.

Now the Young Witness newspaper is following the example of activists in Dubbo and Canberra and running daily comparisons of petrol prices in the area.

“We're taking the advice of outgoing NRMA director Graham Blight and publishing the fuel prices for the day,” the paper wrote yesterday in its first fuel price round-up.

“In fact, we're going to do it every day of the week so local drivers can see where the cheapest fuel in town is.

“Bear with us because we imagine we’re going to have to hotfoot it around (and) probably get chased away from a few fuel stations!”

The paper is providing comparison prices from surrounding districts and also from Sydney to illustrate the iniquities of the situation.

Witness reporter Christine Speelman credits her editor Edwina Mason with the idea for the daily report after Mr Blight “put us in that direction”.

“At first we were just going to report on the idea of people power getting results but then we thought ‘let’s do it’ and put the graph together,” she said.

“We thought we should be proactive about and our readers have responded – we got 17 comments and 45 likes for our first post, and in a town of 7000 people that’s pretty good!”

There are 3999 friends of the Witness's Facebook page and yesterday's story reached 3710 people, with today's report reaching 545 people and attracting 11 likes and one comment in the first hour alone.

And it looks like the campaign is already getting results: the price of E10 at the local BP outlet dropped by five cents overnight.

This story first appeared on the mynrma.com.au website.