Yes, you will pay more: Bowen’s EV scheme is dodgier than Princess Kate’s faked photo

Claims that the government’s emissions reduction plan for vehicles will not limit choice or drive up costs fly in the face of all available logic, testimony, and evidence.

Chris Bowen must be thanking his lucky stars for Princess Kate.

With Her Royal Highness’s dodgy Photoshop hitting the top of the news, the energy minister’s vehicle emissions scheme is now only the second-most ridiculous cut and paste job Australians have been asked to swallow this week.

Let’s compare the two, shall we?

First, the Duchess of Cambridge, who has asked us to believe that she was just fooling around with some editing software on her phone before releasing a photo of her and her kids that was later killed as a fake by every major news agency on the planet.

Surely some adviser, some courtier in the Wales household on seeing the photo’s slightly disembodied arms and hands, would have said something to her royal highness, yes?

Energy Minister Chris Bowen would have you believe messing with the auto market won’t make some cars more expensive. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

These are not “off with their heads” days anymore, and given the bizarre and sometimes vicious speculation since her surgery earlier this year, Kensington Palace would have been eager to avoid feeding the beast by letting a badly doctored photo out into the world.

Yet, somehow, here we are.

As these things go, the story is somewhere between odd and entertaining and won’t cost Australians a penny.

The Princess of Wales’ explanation for THAT photo. Picture: Instagram

Kate’s troublesome photo, and the bits that appear tinkered with. Picture: AFP

On the other hand, the government’s vehicle emission scheme seems like much more of a paradox.

And an expensive one, too.

To listen to Bowen and the EV lobby (which has an absolutely vested interest in steering drivers away from petrol and diesel) the strategy will simultaneously increase the choice of electrics on offer while not making conventional Rangers and Mustangs and Land Cruisers more pricey.

But, come on.

The most basic market economics tells us this is impossible.

The whole point of the scheme is to make it less attractive for consumers to buy (and for automakers to sell) petrol and diesel vehicles and cheaper for them buy EVs.

They’ll do this by imposing costs on cars with big emissions, and make automakers pass the charge on to consumers or offset them by selling more EVs or trading with other car companies.

HiLux maker Toyota has said that its popular ute will be more expensive under the government’s scheme.

It’s classic nudge theory in which the government doesn’t force you to do what it wants but rather steers you in the direction it likes, often without you knowing it.

Only this time, consumers absolutely will.

The Bowen camp, which wants to cut vehicle emissions by 60 per cent by the end of the decade, wants you to believe that this won’t make the petrol and diesel vehicles Australians rely on for work and play more expensive.

“This is all about choice,” the energy minister has claimed time and again in recent weeks.

In this, the government is being backed in by the local EV lobby, which is pushing hard for government policy to force Australians to adopt the new technology one way or the other.

EV makers Polestar and Tesla, who stand to make a fortune off the transition, have quit the automotive chamber that belled the cat on the anticipated rise in prices, which could amount to an additional $8,000 or more on the sticker price of a Ford Ranger.

On the other side of the ledger Toyota, whose HiLux utes and Land Cruisers are a vital part of the local automotive landscape, says the government is going too far.

Isuzu and other companies have said much the same, with a few threatening to leave the local market if it’s all too complex or expensive.

EV maker Tesla stands to profit from selling credits to other manufacturers. Picture: Thomas Wielecki

What was that about more choice again?

Other assumptions are just as bonkers.

Bowen is fond of repeating the line that Australia and Russia are the only “major nations” to lack comprehensive vehicle emissions standards.

Speaking to 2GB’s Chris O’Keefe last Friday, Bowen said that 85 per cent of car sales globally were already covered under such schemes: “Why would Australia and Russia want to be the only two countries in the world, major countries, that don’t have rules like this?”, he asked.

You would think that the weight of all those other markets and their emissions standards would pretty much determine what we get in Australia.

After all, thanks to EU safety standards almost any car sold anywhere in the world now looks like a jelly bean that got left on a radiator (merci, Brussels!).

Yet for whatever reason Bowen suggests car makers are producing high polluting, petrol swilling beasts just for our little market of 27 million people who drive on the left (Russians, according to countless dashcam video sites, just drive on whichever side of the road they like).

And let’s remember this is all being pushed by the same tribe of zealots for whom no pleasure, from a properly powerful showerhead to the smell of a wood-burning fire, is too small to capture their puritanical attention.

Agencies killed the Princess Cate photo, and the Duchess had the good grace to apologise and withdraw the pic.

Chris Bowen is likely no monarchist, but he could learn a thing or two from this behaviour.