Vikki Campion: If Labor is serious about electric cars, then wipe the luxury car tax

It will be decades before average Australians will be able to afford an electric vehicle. If Labor was serious about them, they would wipe the luxury car tax altogether, writes Vikki Campion.

Labor has returned to their coal mining Jerusalem … sort of.

In their hip crusade for Elon Musk has come an epiphany — discount coal-fire-powered cars for all who can afford a very expensive car!

The coal miner is back in Labor as it begins to fight for new ground in next month’s Upper Hunter by-election. Most electricity in Australia comes from coal, electric vehicles themselves are manufactured in China using Australian coal, they require extra mining to find material for the batteries and while the odd Tesla might come from airfreight on jet fuel, most are shipped over here using fossil fuels.

To be fair, Labor’s new electric vehicle policy is not an emissions policy, it’s a $3000 discount for urbanites who want to blow $72,000 on a Tesla. Not the stacking-bricks hands-like-sandpaper types. More the kind of look-at-me-I-am-awake-to-the-world types.

It will be decades before your average Australian, let alone the more vulnerable, will be able to afford an EV. If Labor were serious about them, they would wipe the luxury car tax altogether.

Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese after test driving a NISSAN electric car in Liverpool. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Only 0.6 per cent of total car sales in Australia are electric – something the EV Council absurdly blames on state and federal governments and not that the safest EVs are priced at triple the average bush wage and despite the astronomical price tag is useless when it comes to any grunt work. Unable to tow a trailer, horses, boat, camper or caravan even to the closest charger in the bush, the real reason nobody, (just 1400 EV sales in ten months of 2020 Australia-wide compared to 726,000 brand new petrol models) buys electric cars here is that nobody wants them.

People who have the money to burn $200,000 on a luxury car are not doing it because of the economical fuel savings. With that sort of cash burning a hole in your pocket you don’t pull a boat by a car, you drive to it at the marina.

I had a friend who was going to buy a Tesla but cancelled his order to put six figures down on a house deposit instead. It was better value.

New, cheap Chinese-made EV’s that are not designed for the rough conditions of Australian roads, and few of which are ANCAP tested, could mean a trade-off between safer, better-built, low-emitting cars such as hybrids, or cheap but dangerous, zero-emission vehicles which are responsible for vastly more emissions in their lifetime than a petrol car.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Picture: AFP

A cheap EV meeting a roo on the road at night between Tenterfield and Toowoomba will bring a whole new meaning to terror.

No car manufacturer or insurance body believes there will not be petrol cars on Australian roads in nine years. Petrol engines may be phased out of development by then, but in 2034 those of the common clay will still be towing a boat with a 2029 model Toyota HiLux.

Electric cars have a place in populous cities with upgraded energy grids where people are driving short trips and will never afford their own home so may as well blow coin on an expensive set of wheels.

There are many smaller countries in Europe where EVs are PC, but there is not a single model on the market that would apply to Labor’s policy that could be used for any heavy lifting in regional Australia in either distance or pulling power.

With additional roll and wind resistance, it would be a very slow trip with a horse trailer behind an EV with a long stop every 200km or less.

Only Tesla has a heavy utility in development, but it speaks to Labor’s understanding of the bush that none would be able to afford it.

A new all-wheel-drive Tesla would, according to car buffs, perform on jagged bulldust, but who will pay $200,000 for a luxury SUV only to whack on a bullbar, spotties, tow-bar, roof racks and whack it around dirt roads to pony camp?

The new Volkswagen (VW) ID. 4 electric automobile. Most electric cars will be out of the average Australia’s price range for years to come.

Our car manufacturers are dead and buried. These EV will be designed for countries with coal-fired power, nuclear-power, massive hydro and a Kyoto smattering of renewables. Look at all the cars on the road and ask how cooking dinner, washing the kid’s clothes and charging every damn car in Australia is going to work on a grid near-collapse now.

The once-great party of the worker will lean further to the left as the right-wing HSU abandons NSW Labor, costing the organisation $200,000 in affiliation fees a year and $500,000 in donations across state and federal election campaigns, and potentially, Kristina Keneally’s number one position on the Senate ticket.

As the proposal to exempt electric vehicles below the luxury car tax threshold from import tariffs and fringe benefits tax rattled around at Labor’s Federal Conference this week, former PM Malcolm Turnbull somehow found himself a long way from his harbourside home and deep in the guts of Newcastle Port, one of the world’s biggest coal export terminals, swanning by Environment Minister Matt Kean’s side.

Always one to “help”, the former PM dazzled onlookers by taking notes for NSW’s self-appointed climate change tsar, sparking a flurry of messages to chief conservative campaigners to send them back to Potts Point before they could further damage Coalition chances to win back the Upper Hunter.

The Upper Hunter needs someone who can identify with miners, with approaches even made to Joel Fitzgibbon to win the seat, and force NSW into minority government and go head to head against Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Now that would be a real Damascene event for Labor.