Vikki Campion: You pay for an EV even if you don’t own an EV
Only a government tripping hard could dream up a transport future where people who can’t afford cars subsidise the wealthy elite’s new cars, while telling you to buy them in places that cannot charge them, writes Vikki Campion.
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Telegraph journalist James O’Doherty did the tests to prove magic mushrooms were growing at NSW parliament this week, but it seems they were discovered long ago.
Like the straight mate watching in horror as their shroom-eyed friend climbs a traffic light yelling about their “spiritual journey”, the NSW taxpayer is facing a long, sober night trying to pull the NSW Government off the power pole of a plan that could easily have been brewed with golden tops picked from Parliament’s psychedelic garden.
You would have to be off your face to think it is a good idea to force everyone who pays tax, rates or a power bill, no matter how meagre their income, to splash out for the juice for the state’s registered 49,768 electric vehicles.
It’s intentions are revealed in a submission to a new inquiry, where the NSW Government, which has already committed $165m to new EV chargers, pledges its devotion to its climate and energy guru, Chris Bowen, to “make NSW the easiest place to buy and use an EV in Australia” and “to increase EV sales to 52% by 2030-31”.
In the government fog of induced euphoria it said: “EV sales will need to be 100% of new vehicle sales by 2035. This represents a steep trajectory for EV uptake.”
As Bowen’s most devoted disciple, the NSW Government wants us to bankroll EVs and their juice.
To achieve this whacked out goal to go from less than 0.8 per cent registered EVs in NSW to 100 per cent in a decade, is to make the public pay for chargers.
So far, NSW taxpayers have already splurged on 87 fast and ultra-fast charging stations, 497 destination chargers, 391 metropolitan kerbside sites, 82 EV-ready buildings and over 4300 EVs and 1241 smart chargers for business, NGO and council fleets.
While you hope your old Toyota Rav 4 doesn’t conk out en route to Aldi, you will be funding the charging stations for those in the top tax bracket.
Ausgrid wants to install 38,000 public EV charging ports on the poles it owns and, in its submission, calls for “government funding, cost recovery from EV users, cost recovery from electricity customers, or a mix of these models”.
That’s everyone who pays a power bill, even if you’re catching the bus or riding a bike you found in a skip bin.
This is on top of the rort to get people into EVs, which MP Garth Hamilton sums up nicely in an Instagram reel: the more you earn, the cheaper an EV is for you under the EV tax exemption. If you are on $200,000 a year, a Tesla Model 3 costs only $769 a month to lease, while if you earn $50,000 a year, that car will cost you $1,055 a month because you are in a lower tax bracket.
The electric car exemption subsidises new EVs for people who not only can already afford brand new luxury vehicles but who probably own multiple investment properties to get their tax bill down.
This little trick costs taxpayers at a federal level about $1.795bn over six years, as detailed in foregone revenue in the government tax and expenditure insight statement.
Here is where the Timothy Leary of government policy starts to kick in: We don’t have the electricity network capacity in regional areas to support this.
Councils, such as Warren, told the inquiry “the grid may not accommodate the load requirements of even moderate-scale fast charging stations” while the Riverina and Murray revealed in regional and rural communities electric energy “can be poor, inconsistent and unreliable” and, as such, “several communities are unable to expand because of their poor energy supply, while others suffer regular brownouts and/or blackouts”.
But why heed this warning when Guru Bowen says it must be so, and his disciple is promising more EVs and more chargers.
Councils who would never consider running a servo are also spending your rates on public EV chargers in postcodes where most registered vehicles are 4WDs because most sedans would struggle on dirt roads and deep potholes.
In this acid nightmare, the government forces everyone who doesn’t have a luxury EV to pay for the chargers for everyone who does.
Less than one per cent of light vehicles in NSW are EVs but, somehow within five years, 50 per cent of NSW will be, and within a decade 100 per cent? Even in areas with unreliable grids despite their many renewables?
And that’s if they make it here at all, with EV cargo ship, the Morning Midas, still smouldering at sea.
But then again, it all comes from the same ashram where people believe Mr Bowen will change the weather.
Only a government tripping harder than a backpacker at a Bondi full moon party could dream up a transport future this unhinged, where people who can’t afford cars subsidise the wealthy elite’s new cars, while they tell you to buy them in places that cannot charge them.
COMMON SENSE GOES UP IN SMOKE AS CIGARETTES WAR DELIGHTS CRIMS
Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Instead of Health Minister Mark Butler cracking down on crime gangs selling illegal tobacco, his department is forcing small business and family-owned corner stores to bin hundreds of thousands of dollars of smokes which are until July 1 perfectly legal stock.
Those who have been playing by the rules, providing the government $7.4bn in tobacco tax, are now being persecuted by the government, all because the Department of Health will not allow them to sell the already suppled cigarettes because they don’t have a new health warning scribbled on the side of the stick.
It will not be long now until all retailers stop selling legal cigarettes, and that fat $16.3bn stack of tobacco tax that smokers once delivered the government dwindles to nothing.
All the while we will face another health crisis, with people smoking all sorts of unknown chemicals in unregulated and illegal Chinese vapes and durries. The government will have the same success in stamping out illegal cigarettes, as they have failed to do on dope, coke and meth.
The new cigarettes will also, according to Butler’s department, “have different names – words like ‘smooth’ and names like ‘gold’ that can falsely suggest some products are less harmful will be removed”.
There is not a smoker on earth who believes cigarettes are not harmful, but there will now be a new cohort of people who cannot work out what the low strength cigarette is called. Are we going to take the labels off mid-strength beer?
Neither of the excise’s two big goals, raking in revenue or curbing smoking, will be achieved anytime soon, thanks to the booming black market undercutting both.
Yet once again, federal Labor is ignoring this, even as the NSW Premier Chris Minns urged a meeting of state and federal health ministers on Friday to cut the excise rate.
When will they admit what the cops already know, that this government-created crime syndicate paradise has successfully made the gross profit margin higher on illegal cigarettes than heroin?
LIFTER
Israel for flying home selfie yacht activist Greta Thunberg and playing her a video of the atrocities committed by the terrorist organisation she supports.
LEANER
The NACC. There will be a lot of parliamentary staffers who have endured trauma who can all look forward to delightful $2.4 million payments since that is the going rate
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Originally published as Vikki Campion: You pay for an EV even if you don’t own an EV