Two Instruments, One Signature Day: What Adelaide Actually Produced

The Adelaide meeting produced two distinct legal instruments, and the distinction matters. The first is the Protocol on Economic Resilience and Essential Supplies, which sits inside the Singapore–Australia Free Trade Agreement and governs trade in essential supplies. The second is the Australia–Singapore Industrial Base Resiliency Arrangement, a defence-industry arrangement aimed at the resilience of defence supply chains.

The Protocol delivers on a Joint Statement issued by Prime Ministers Albanese and Wong on 10 April 2026. Its subject is practical: essential supplies including petroleum oils such as diesel, and liquefied natural gas. That focus reflects real dependence. Singapore supplies 55 per cent of Australia’s petrol, 15 per cent of its diesel and 23 per cent of its aviation fuel, and Australia imports around 90 per cent of the fuel it uses. When a single trading partner sits astride that much of a nation’s fuel, a promise to keep it flowing is worth having. The question is what kind of promise it is.

A Promise Between Governments, Not a Term of Your Contract

The Protocol’s operative commitment is a best-efforts undertaking, not a guarantee. The governments commit to manage and minimise supply-chain disruption and, critically, to try not to impose export bans between them. The language is deliberately soft.

The Protocol enhances cooperation on economic resilience including by seeking to manage and minimise supply chain disruptions and endeavouring not to adopt export prohibitions or restrictions on essential supplies between us.

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, ‘Australia and Singapore Sign Landmark Protocol on Economic Resilience and Essential Supplies’ (Media Release, 27 July 2026).

Read those verbs. “Seeking to” and “endeavouring not to” are the language of aspiration, not of obligation. The Protocol is guided by the rules of the World Trade Organization, which preserve each state’s right to restrict exports in defined circumstances, including national-security and critical-shortage exceptions. Oversight runs through a government-to-government body, the Australia–Singapore Economic Resilience Dialogue, not through any court a private supplier could approach.

Two features put the Protocol beyond the reach of your contract. First, it operates only between the two states; it confers no right on a private buyer or seller and creates no cause of action if a shipment fails. Second, it is not yet in force. It takes effect only when both countries complete their domestic processes. A disruption tomorrow would be governed by your contract alone. The Protocol lowers the political temperature; it does not allocate a single dollar of commercial loss.

Force Majeure Is a Creature of Your Contract, Not the Common Law

Australian law has no free-standing doctrine of force majeure. If your contract does not contain a force majeure clause, you do not have one. The only general escape route is the doctrine of frustration, and it is deliberately narrow.

The High Court set the boundaries in Codelfa Construction Pty Ltd v State Rail Authority of NSW (1982) 149 CLR 337. Frustration discharges a contract only where a supervening event, without the fault of either party, makes performance radically different from what was agreed, not merely more expensive or less convenient. A government export restriction on fuel might, in a severe case, frustrate a supply contract. But a party who has to buy replacement cargo at a higher price, or accept a delayed shipment, will usually find that frustration does not apply and that the contract remains on foot. That is exactly the gap a force majeure clause is meant to fill.

The result is commercial, not academic. A well-drafted force majeure clause names the events it covers, and an export prohibition or a government-ordered diversion of essential supplies should be named expressly rather than left to a general phrase such as “acts of government.” It states the consequence: suspension of performance, an extension of time, a right to source substitute supply, and a long-stop right to terminate if the event endures. It allocates the cost of the delay. Leave any of these to implication and you are back inside the narrow confines of Codelfa.

The CISG Default You Did Not Choose: Article 79

If you sell goods across the Singapore–Australia border, a convention you may never have read is probably governing your contract. Both Australia and Singapore are contracting states to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Unless your contract excludes it, the CISG applies automatically to a sale of goods between businesses in the two countries, and it displaces the domestic sale-of-goods rules you might have assumed applied.

The CISG has its own excuse-for-non-performance regime in Article 79, and it does not read like a commercial force majeure clause.

A party is not liable for a failure to perform any of his obligations if he proves that the failure was due to an impediment beyond his control and that he could not reasonably be expected to have taken the impediment into account at the time of the conclusion of the contract or to have avoided or overcome it or its consequences.

United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, opened for signature 11 April 1980, 1489 UNTS 3 (entered into force 1 January 1988) art 79(1); enacted in New South Wales as Sale of Goods (Vienna Convention) Act 1986 (NSW).

Article 79 excuses damages, but only for an impediment that is beyond control, unforeseeable at the time of contracting and unavoidable. A publicly negotiated pact of the kind signed in Adelaide cuts against the seller here: once the risk of fuel-supply disruption is a matter of ministerial communiqués and front-page coverage, it becomes harder to argue that a later disruption was unforeseeable. Article 79 also excuses only damages; it does not automatically end the contract or hand you a clean right to walk away. The practical lesson is to decide deliberately whether to exclude the CISG and apply a bespoke force majeure regime, or to keep the CISG and supplement Article 79 with express terms. Silence chooses for you, and it rarely chooses well.

Incoterms Allocate the Border Risk: Make Sure You Chose Deliberately

Your Incoterm decides who carries the goods across the border and who is responsible for clearing them, and those allocations bite hardest when an export restriction lands. Incoterms 2020 assign export-clearance and import-clearance responsibility differently across the eleven rules, and the choice is often made by habit rather than analysis.

Under the C and F family, such as FOB, CFR and CIF, the seller handles export clearance and the buyer handles import; under EXW the buyer shoulders export formalities it may be poorly placed to perform; under DDP the seller takes on import clearance in the destination country. If an export licence is refused or a prohibition is imposed, the party carrying that clearance obligation is the party exposed, unless a force majeure clause redistributes the risk. Incoterms allocate cost and risk in the ordinary course; they are not a force majeure regime, and they will not rescue the party who assumed a clearance obligation it cannot now discharge. Choose the Incoterm with the border risk in mind, and make sure it is consistent with your force majeure and governing-law clauses rather than pulling against them.

Defence-Adjacent Suppliers: A Separate Arrangement, the Same Lesson

Businesses in the defence-industrial supply chain have their own instrument to note, and the same warning applies. The Australia–Singapore Industrial Base Resiliency Arrangement is a government-to-government commitment to strengthen cooperation between the two defence industries and improve supply-chain resilience.

Like the trade Protocol, it operates at the level of states and policy, not private contract. It does not modify your subcontract, your export-control obligations under Australia’s defence trade-control regime, or your delivery commitments to a prime contractor. If anything, defence-adjacent supply contracts carry sharper risk, because export controls in this sector are more restrictive and more actively enforced. The arrangement is a reason to expect a more predictable policy environment, not a reason to leave a supply agreement thinly drafted.

A Worked Example: A Supply-Continuity Clause That Does the Work

The abstract point becomes concrete in a clause. Consider a Singapore seller supplying diesel to an Australian buyer under a twelve-month contract. A general “acts of God and government” clause leaves both parties guessing when a partial export restriction hits. A purpose-built supply-continuity clause does not.

A workable clause names the trigger without ambiguity: any embargo, quota, prohibition, licence refusal or government-directed diversion affecting the export of the goods from Singapore or their import into Australia. It states the immediate effect: the affected party’s obligations are suspended, not discharged, for the duration of the event, with a matching extension of time. It imposes a mitigation duty: the seller must use reasonable endeavours to source substitute supply from an unaffected origin, and the buyer must accept conforming substitute goods. It fixes the cost of substitution, whether the buyer meets the reasonable price differential or the parties share it. And it sets a long-stop: if the event continues beyond, say, sixty days, either party may terminate the affected volumes without liability for the balance. Every one of those decisions is commercial, and every one is lost if the clause is left generic.

Draft the clause in plain, mandatory language. Use “must” for obligations and “may” for rights, define “essential supplies” and “export restriction” once and use the defined terms consistently, and make sure the force majeure clause, the Incoterm and the governing-law and CISG position all point the same way. A supply-continuity clause that contradicts the Incoterm it sits beside is worse than no clause at all.

Your Contract Review Checklist Before the Protocol Enters Force

The window before the Protocol takes effect is the time to review, not after a disruption. We recommend five checks on every contract in the Singapore–Australia corridor.

First, confirm you have a force majeure clause at all, and that it names export prohibitions and government-directed diversion of essential supplies expressly. Second, confirm the clause states its consequences: suspension, extension, substitute supply, cost allocation and a long-stop right to terminate. Third, decide deliberately whether the CISG applies or is excluded, and align Article 79 with your bespoke terms rather than leaving the two to collide. Fourth, check that your Incoterm allocates border-clearance risk to the party best placed to bear it, and that it is consistent with the force majeure clause. Fifth, confirm the governing-law and dispute-resolution clauses give you a forum you can actually use if a cargo is held. Do this now, while the Protocol is a headline and not yet a live disruption.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Specialised legal counsel should be sought for specific fact patterns.