Petrol prices might be about to get even worse for Kiwis, that's despite rising by 26c per litre this year alone.
Predictions suggest the price could go even higher.
New Zealand Automobile Association (AA) fuel prices spokesperson Terry Collins told AM our petrol prices were "literally" at the mercy of international conflicts and geopolitics.
"We're driven by all those external costs, the price of the fuel, the shipping, the refining etc, and the only part we have any control over is the taxes and the levies we put on the fuel over here," he said.
Collins also said that fuel prices reflect what's been happening in the economy generally.
"The price of running a petrol car has gone up just under 11 percent, that's including all the costs, insurances, etc, over the past year and obviously fuel is one of those inputs that drives those costs up," he said.
Collins explained how the recent jump comes after Kiwis saw high prices around September last year, then a drop off over summer.
"We enjoyed a bit of a honeymoon period over our holiday period, Christmas time, where the international price of fuel got down to about US$75 a barrel, now it's back up around the $90 mark.
"Combining that with a little bit of increase in refining costs and shipping costs, the changes of our exchange rate, we're back to around that $3 thereabouts mark for 91 petrol."
However, Collins didn't believe oil companies were just putting prices up to what consumers had grown used to, saying the industry was well-monitored.
"They have to supply all their sales data to the Government, it's monitored very strictly. I'm not seeing anything around their margins that would indicate they're taking any advantage of that at all," he said.
"As I said, it's mainly driven by these events - we had a big spike when Russia invaded Ukraine because they were such a massive oil producer and we put sanctions on them. What I found interesting was once the Hamas and Israel conflict kicked off we saw a bit of a spike but everything's kind of settled down.
"So what we're tending to see is when we do get these big incidents internationally, it has a short-term impact on the market which then seems to stabalise. In the past, those impacts could've lasted longer but they're not now."
