What hope for Tesla, or any other EVs, once Dutton goes full MAGGA? | Opinion

It is surely only a matter of days until Peter Dutton rains fire and fury upon electric vehicles and their infuriating refusal to burn fossil fuels the way his political backers would prefer, and no doubt their sneaky plan to turn Australia’s weekends woke with vegetarian barbecues that smell like those weird spices brought in by all those bloody immigrants.

His recent U-turns on supporting our Paris climate targets seem to suggest that he has had a few late nights out with Lay Down Barnaby Joyce and has decided to go full MAGGA (Make Australia Gas Guzzling Again).

This does not augur well for the future of EVs in this country, not so much people being able to buy the cars – despite years of rigid resistance from the Coalition we now have emissions laws, which will only encourage take-up – but with any kind of Government spending on charging infrastructure.

Sure, it’s slow now, but it could be worse.

A stack of lies you could drive a Toyota HiLux through | Opinion

It’s quite clear that the idea of charging up cars using renewable energy is about as attractive to people like David LIttlebrain, sorry, Littleproud, the current and probably temporary leader of the Nationals, as drinking a schooner of cold vomit.

Littleproud, who looks like the kind of “science” teacher who spruiks creationism in American schools, has announced that the Coalition will “cap” investment in renewable energy if elected, and says we don’t need large-scale solutions like wind farms because… well, he doesn’t really say the quiet part out loud, but largely because Gina Rinehart doesn’t like the idea. And because, just like Barnaby Loudvoice, he doesn’t actually believe climate change is real.

Speaking of Rinehart, while previous Coalition leaders may have been a little too enamoured with royalty, Dutton worships a different kind of Re-Gina, and recently spent $23,000, and quite a lot of CO2, on a private jet flight to kiss Rinehart’s ring at a conference organised by her company where he spoke about, and I’m not making this up, the cost-of-living crisis. 

The incredible thing about Dutton’s backslide on his not-so-warm climate commitments is that he was forced into making them by public opinion, in the shape of the shellacking his party got at the last election, particularly from climate-focused Teal candidates. 

He now seems to have decided that measuring public opinion is a stupid way to go about getting elected and that he’s just going to appeal to the part of the electorate best described as IOAIDGAS (I’m Old And I Don’t Give A Shit). The kind of people who have grandchildren, but obviously don’t overly care for them.

Some of these people, like Barnaby, still have jobs, and have decided that keeping them is more important than stopping the world from resembling whatever hellscape he sprung from. He recently suggested that we should abandon the Paris agreement entirely, because “in the end, aspirations have to take a secondary position to the economic reality”.

“You cannot destroy the economy for the purposes of a policy,” he said. Conveniently ignoring what his government did with the handouts during Covid.

“The political reality that sits behind that is if the lights go out and the economy is shelled out, you’ll get voted out.”

Sure, it’s so hot in Mexico that monkeys are falling out of the trees dead from heatstroke, but as Barnaby would no doubt point out, they’re not koalas, and more importantly, they can’t vote.

I recently spent a few days with two journalists from New Delhi, who described how terrifying it was to live through a recent heat spike that hit 52.3 degrees. They were lucky enough to have air conditioning and said that going outside was not an option, not only because of the heat, but because breathing the air was like smoking 20 cigarettes in a sauna.

Also on my trip away was a senior car executive from Norway who just shook his head in disbelief when I told him how far behind Australia was on the transition to electric cars, and charging infrastructure in particular. “It’s just not that hard, I’ve seen it,” he insisted. 

Not long before that I was chatting with another car exec who’d recently returned from Korea, where he said you can find a charger every 30km, in any direction, anywhere (yes, the size of South Korea helps, but even if we just focused on the bits of Australia where people live – 50 per cent of us are in Sydney and Melbourne – it would be something).

The other gamble that Dutton seems to be making is that by the time the next election rolls around here, the future of the world will have been properly screwed by the return of President Donald Trump.

Among the many deranged things he says, one of the most frightening is his promise to “drill baby drill” from day one. In return for large donations from oil and mineral miners, he’s pledged to cancel all EV subsidies and allow mining anywhere and everywhere they like – including Alaska.

“The former president also said he would auction off more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, eliminate Biden’s “ridiculous” new pollution standards for combustion engine vehicles, shift away from wind energy, and reverse actions taken to decrease energy production in Alaska.”

He also recently claimed that climate change, and sea level rises, means we would “basically have a little more beachfront property.”

It’s fair to say that if Trump is elected, that will not be good news for Tesla, or any other EV companies in the world hoping to sell their wares in the US.