NSW Budget reply sees Chris Minns launch policy to cut tradie tolls

NSW Labor will push toll relief for tradies and small contractors in new leader Chris Minns’s first budget reply speech.

NSW Labor will promise toll relief for tradies and small contractors in new Leader Chris Minns’s crucial first budget reply speech on Wednesday.

Mr Minns will argue there are 500,000 tradies and sole traders in NSW who are forced to rely on toll roads to do business and deserve toll relief in the same way private motorists are.

It is a significant play for the demographic that has moved to vote Liberal in the past decade and the first sign of how Mr Minns will make a bid to win back the tradie and the worker.

“Toll-mania is strangling Sydney. The people who drive every day pay too much. Far too much,” Mr Minns will say in his speech today.

Chris Minns will call for toll relief. Picture: Gaye Gerard

“This needs a big conversation about how to fix it – but the tradespeople and owner-drivers who keep our city moving shouldn’t have to wait – they deserve immediate relief.

“What they need is to pay less now.”

The NSW budget showed that toll relief was being underspent by the government.

While the budget had predicted $74 million would be handed back to motorists in the form of free registration, the updated figures revised that to just $59 million.

Mr Minns will lay out how the government could save tradies and owner drivers hundreds of dollars a year by giving them access to the toll relief scheme that private motorists have access to.

“We believe the Government should extend the rego discount scheme to tradies and owner-drivers for two years,” Mr Minns will say.

“The money is there – just this year alone, the current toll relief scheme underspent by $15 million. Over the next four years, there is likely to be hundreds of millions left over in the program.

“It’s clearly not getting the money out the door, and needs to be expanded.

“This government’s tollmania is hurting everyone – and everyone deserves at least some relief.”

The shift of blue collar workers from Labor to the Liberal party has been a problem at state and federal levels for at least a decade.

Ms Minns pledged to tackle tolls when he took the Labor leadership. This is his first solid policy in the area.

The NSW budget said the government had saved drivers an average saving of $347. Mr Minns believes that toll relief can be stretched much further.