On Tuesday night, Ben Carroll received a phone call: police were looking for him.
The Victorian premier had met with the state’s police commissioner earlier that morning – so he wasn’t exactly hard to find.
But the officers weren’t looking to speak to him about their resources, powers or investigations. They wanted to know if he had driven off from a service station without paying for his petrol on Monday night.
“Late Monday night, I was running some errands and filled up the car with petrol,” Carroll said in a statement early on Wednesday morning.
“[I] found out yesterday I forgot to pay. I fixed the bill straight away.”
He added that he was “grateful for the team at the servo for their understanding”.
It’s understood Carroll had filled up his car near his home in his electorate of Niddrie on Monday night, after spending the evening responding to the alleged attack on the federal MP Helen Haines in regional Victoria earlier that day.
Unbeknown to him – as he met with Victoria police commissioner, Mike Bush, the head of the Australian federal police, Krissy Barrett, and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese – officers had begun searching for him.
It’s understood they contacted him through the Department of Parliamentary Services on Tuesday night.
A bashful Carroll then headed back to the service station to pay up.
No further action is expected to be taken.
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Speaking at an event on Wednesday, Carroll said that, after a “tough day” on Monday, he had offered to return his daughter’s friend’s pencil case and filled the car with petrol on the way home.
He said former deputy premier John Thwaites had since contacted him to say: “Don’t worry, Ben. I didn’t pay for the petrol, and I also drove off with the nozzle in the car and took the petrol bowser with me.”
“That made me feel a lot better,” Carroll told the Age forum. “It shows that politicians are human beings, and even premiers make mistakes.”
Asked about the matter on Wednesday, Bush said the view of police was that a petrol drive-off was a “civil matter unless it’s proven otherwise”.
“If someone does something accidentally, non-deliberately, it becomes a very civil matter,” the commissioner said. “That civil redress is available, and I do understand that civil redress was made.
“It does occur and that’s why we’re very careful not to criminalise every petrol driver. We do understand, and I’m very empathic and sympathetic to petrol station owners who do suffer, but it’s not always criminal [behaviour].”
It came months after Carroll’s predecessor, Jacinta Allan, told parliament that police were grappling with a rise in illegal drive-offs from petrol stations.
“We are seeing a rise in incidents of drive-offs at service stations, and it is an illegal practice,” she said in March.
