Pollies turn attention to taxing EVs while big mining gets discounted diesel

Sadly, I think we’ve all come to just accept that our governments in this country are very busy sexually harassing and occasionally even impregnating one another, paying way over the odds (with our money) for certain bits of land, approving casinos we neither want nor need and committing criminal acts, but not committing them to memory.

With so much on, it might be unrealistic to expect them to do something about climate change, something as cheap and simple as actually encouraging people to move towards zero-emission, or even just lower-emission, cars. It certainly seems overly optimistic to hope for such things.

And yet it still comes as a shock to hear that some politicians – who I picture meeting up late at night in dark rooms with shady executives, after having obscured their faces with lashings of coal dust – are finding the time to actively dissuade people from buying electric vehicles by attempting to bring in short-sighted, nay blindly stupid, road-user taxes for people who buy them.

The EV road tax, which some people are calling a world-first – much like electing a reality-TV star was back in the day – was officiously proposed by South Australian state treasurer Rob Lucas last week, who described his decision as a “no brainer”, which is at least partly right, but not in the way thinks.

Taxing people for every kilometre they drive in an EV makes sense to him because their owners don’t pay fuel excise, because they don’t buy fuel.

He sounds a bit like one of those people who says their taxes shouldn’t be spent on schools because they don’t have children, but that aside, being a Treasurer, he knows damn well he’s speaking flim-flam.

His suggestion is that EV buyers need to chip in for the roads they’re driving on and if they don’t pay fuel excise they’re not doing so. But that’s just not how it works.

Fuel excise goes to the same place that nicotine and alcohol taxes do – general revenue – and that money is then spent on anything and everything we expect authorities to pay for.

If his idea is that EV owners are somehow getting a better deal – and imagine the horror of someone giving a financial incentive to consumers for doing something that might help out with our CO2 problems – then he’s wrong again.

Buyers of electric vehicles give plenty to the tax department by paying so much for their cars, which are, as a rule, more expensive than petrol ones.

Aside from the GST they pay on top of those prices – which goes to the States, by the way – they are often bumped up into the unfortunate price point where they have to pay Luxury Car Tax as well. Don’t get me started on that, and the relative absence of a luxury boat, helicopter, private jet or jewellery tax.

The real kicker, though, isn’t the stupidity and mean-ness of the tax, it’s the effect that it has. At a time when we desperately need more people to go EV, his idea would discourage many from doing so, and at what benefit?

Exactly how many EV owners is he going to be able to collect tax from, in South Australia? If it’s more than 1000 I’ll move to Adelaide, which is punishment indeed.

As someone put it to me, some form of road tax is inevitable in the future, as governments attempt to replace the revenue they get from fuel excise, once EVs are accepted on a grand scale, and I get that. Road pricing will make sense, one day – just as the UK policy of charging people rego based on how much CO2 their cars emit already makes sense, right now – but now is the not the time.

What it does now is slam the brakes on the EV market, put the fear into people who might otherwise have considered such a move and generally send all the wrong messages to everyone.

So, where could they perhaps raise this tiny amount of money they feel they’re missing out on, these hard-up governments of ours?

Well, here’s one idea: what about actually collecting the fuel excise from mining companies that continue to dig up our resources, and get tax breaks to do so? Did you know, for example, that under legislation introduced in 2006, many mining businesses are able to claim the cost of excises paid on the diesel they put into their vast trucks and machines as a credit against their tax. That’s 42 cents per litre of diesel that you, as a generous tax payer, are giving to them to run a business that profits from the resources your country owns, which will, in turn, produce vast quantities of CO2.

And you can bet they use a lot of diesel, too, which, as a bonus, also produces CO2 when they burn it. As for those people who’ve invested in doing their bit by buying an EV, well, it seems, they’re the ones taking the piss. And State governments, in South Australia and NSW, so far, are coming after them.

Truly, anyone would think our politicians are bent or something…