Any bets on whether fuel watch will last until the election?

The whole issue of Fuelwatch seems to have died a quiet death with the recent falls in the price of a barrel of oil.

Let's assume that we get lucky and the price drops back down to say $80 a barrel over the next 12 months. Will Foolwatch be wound up as a short lived political expediency, or will it outlive us all as a bureaucratic monster that refuses to die?

I'd like to know whether the staff that are working on it are on contract, or whether they have been taken on permanently. I'd hate to think of the cost of winding it up if they all have to be given redundancy payments.

Anything government related is hard to kill. I met a bloke once that was part of the reform team that Griener put into State Rail in order to stop it sending NSW into bankruptcy. He told me that the SRA finally finished its conversion from coal to diesel at some point in the 1960's. However, it was his job to come in 25 years later and finally close down all the coaling and watering stations that still existed out in the bush, employing a few men here and there, but collectively adding up to thousands of positions.

Have any of the fatheads in Canberra considered the possibility that we might have faced a one-off blip with the oil prices (higher prices of course acting as a brake on consumption whilst spurring more exploration and the bringing on-stream of more production), and that Foolwatch might not have a reason for existing if the price drops back to $80 a barrel or less?

Hell, even at $100 a barrel, people seem to have stopped complaining. Foolwatch was always less use that a dead mullet, but it's even more useless now.