Well, stone the crows, our country cousins have repeatedly enjoyed cheaper petrol and diesel over the past few months than we city slickers. Sometimes the differential in prices has been a gravity-defying 40 cents a litre for petrol.

The cost of fuel has always been the bane of those living outside of the state’s South- East corner. That’s because historically it’s been higher than Brisbane.

There’s also the double whammy of rural and regional Queenslanders having to drive further than their city cousins, and the cost of transporting goods also being influenced by higher fuel prices.

That said, the rural lobby and grower groups are very good at exploiting community sympathy for higher costs of living outside the state’s capital and always have the fuel companies in their sights.

Spurred on by a family connection to Goondiwindi and reports of cheap fuel at the border town, your scribe has done a poultice of hack work in comparing daily petrol and diesel prices across the state over the past few months – with the help of the RACQs fuel tracker app, and the non- townies win big.

Even over the last 10 days, the price differentials have been stark; bush towns such as Goondiwindi and Roma, and provincial cities Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville have enjoyed an average 15 cents a litre advantage, some days as much as 40 cents over we Brisbanites.

When you consider that it costs anywhere as much as 10c a litre to transport fuel to remote locations, rural and regional motorists (and farmers and miners) comparatively are doing well with the current price settings.

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission’ s most recent report on fuel claimed that on average rural and regional Australians had more expensive fuel, but that there was greater price stability outside the capitals.

So what we are seeing now is an aberration.

Why, though, can we currently fill up cheaper in the bush, when it flies in the face of history and economics. Maybe the petrol giants are making a motza in the capitals and don’t need to gouge the regions.

As Brisbane motorists know, fuel prices can move as much as 45 cents a litre in as little as 36 hours, even though it’s coming out of the very same holding tank.

Talk of Aussie dollar dips and petroleum producer cutbacks simply don’t explain away these huge swings. We city slickers are being gouged.

The SEQ fuel price cycle is a mystery to most of us. Put simply,there’s gold in them there hills (aka fuel bowsers).

Is it any wonder, then, that the world’s five big fuel companies logged a record $200b in profits last financial year, close to double the previous financial year. ExxonMobil recorded the highest profits to date, while Shell enjoyed their highest profits in their 115 year history. Enough said.

But back to the bush and its current relatively cheaper fuel. Nothing is by chance in the fuel industry and there is currently a clear strategy to do the right thing by rural and regional Queenslanders and buy some favours, because the fuel companies are making their fill, and then some, in Greater Brisbane.

How long this historical inversion will last is anyone’s guess.