Australia is lagging behind, an earnest Bill Shorten told a press conference last week as he announced his sketchy plan to transform the national car market in a decade.
Indeed Australians unrepentantly lag behind the drivers of, say, Portugal, whose three favourite cars are the Renault Clio, the Fiat 500 and the Renault Megane.
The good news for those who keep an eye these things is that the base model 900cc Clio emits a miserly 94g of carbon dioxide a kilometre.
The bad news is that four grown men will find it somewhat squashy even without their fishing rods and a 45-litre Esky. Which is why God gave us the Toyota HiLux, Ford Territory and Mitsubishi Triton, the top-selling vehicles in Australia, which emit twice the CO2 of the Clio but are better suited to Australian conditions.
Straggle-phobia, the fear of lagging behind the rest of the world, is a condition that has afflicted the intellectual Left since Gough Whitlam was a boy.
Its symptoms are excessive finger wagging at one’s fellow Australians for their backward habits and the delusion that an economy can be pushed in a direction it doesn’t want to go by passing laws and handing out subsidies.
The Left’s straggle-phobia strikes selectively. There is little agitation that we have the third highest effective corporate tax rate in the world, for example. Nor does it allow for the fact the world is getting better. We are never told that a 2018 plated vehicle emits 30 per cent less CO2 than a vehicle fresh from the production line at the start of the century.
Instead we are urged to be more like Norwegians, who have a government that makes its money from fossil fuel and spends it bribing its citizens to drive electric cars. The policy makes sense in a Scandinavian sort of way when you have 32 gigawatts of hydro-generation at your disposal.
In hydro-challenged Australia, however, where coal is fast becoming a four-letter word, the Opposition Leader’s plan to accelerate sales of electric vehicles to 50 per cent of the market in a decade is so wacky it is even raising eyebrows at the ABC.
“Sales of such cars would have to increase by 53 per cent every year,” tweeted political editor Andrew Probyn. “Mmmm. Hard to see that happening.”
It is hard indeed when there are no electric utes, four-wheel drives and SUVs, which make up 60 per cent of the market.
It is harder still given the challenge of installing chargers at convenient intervals along Australia’s 7.6 million kilometres of roads. It is considerably harder than in Britain, for example, where there are 77 cars per square kilometre. In Australia the density is 2.5.
So why is Shorten embarking on this madness? Does he seek a cleaner environment or a cleaner, greener image?
The change to the nation’s carbon footprint will be tiny.
The average car in Australia emits 182g/km. Electric cars charged through the grid emit just 4g/km less, according to Climate Works Australia.
That’s a theoretical abatement of less than 0.6 tonnes for each electric vehicle a year, which will contribute only a fraction of a per cent of the 1.3 billion tonnes of abatement Shorten needs to achieve to meet his 45 per cent emissions reduction target.
This kind of detail is lost on the Opposition Leader, however, as listeners to KIIS FM discovered last week when Shorten surprised host Jackie O with the news that charging an electric vehicle takes “err, eight to 10 minutes depend(ing) on your charge”. A more accurate answer would have been eight to 10 hours.
Australians are paying a heavy price for this kind of sloppy policy thinking. Ten years ago we were told the Australian government absolutely had to build a hugely expensive national broadband network.
Forget mobile broadband, communications minister Stephen Conroy told us, which might provide 12 megabits per second if you’re sitting in laboratory conditions. Today we have the fourth-fastest mobile broadband in the world.
Most Australians use it most of the time for most applications, leaving the NBN largely as a network for heavy users.
What would happen if a Labor government broke the habits of a lifetime and simply did nothing, recognising that previous great experiment in top-down, government-mandated automotive development delivered nothing better than the Trabant?
Cars inevitably would be better in a decade, just as the Triton delivers more than six times the power of a Ford Model T with half the fuel consumption and considerably more comfort.
The EU’s emissions standards are accelerating engine development fast enough. Legislative nudges in Australia would not make them go any faster.
Would-be prime ministers should be wary of picking favourites, particularly when technology is moving fast.
Kevin Rudd bet Australia’s energy supply on the imperfect technology of wind and solar when he locked in a 20 per cent renewable energy target.
Shorten’s electric vehicle target will do the same to transport. The potential of hydrogen fuel cells may yet be realised, allowing electrification without the expense of installing a network of charging stations. The take-up of hybrid petrol-electric vehicles continues to increase as the benefits become better known and the technology more efficient. It is likely to be a far better option for Australian motorists than fully electrical vehicles while providing significant mitigation.
There is one relatively small but overdue reform task that must be performed if Australian motorists are to take full advantage of these developments in greater efficiency and lower emissions.
Our fuel supply should be upgraded to meet the Euro 6 standard, which in effect means removing 91 octane fuel from the bowser, making 95 octane the minimum standard and allowing the market to do the rest.
Most new vehicles are designed to run on fuel with a lower sulphur content and have the added benefit of low emissions.
Shorten would have been better advised to make this his signature transport emissions reduction target at his press conference last week.
Instead of posing in a Tesla he might have got to sit in a Porsche, which incidentally is outselling electric vehicles by two to one.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
Read related topics:Electric Vehicles