Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow the member for Kooyong, and I'm pleased to inform the member for Kooyong that the government does have an electric vehicle government fleet policy. It's to get 75 per cent of government fleets electric by 2025, unless I'm much mistaken, as well as having 1,800 charging stations around the country on our national highways, so that, in a few years time, people will be able to take their electric vehicles from one part of the country to another part of the country with confidence, knowing that they'll have access to efficient publicly available charging stations. I do agree with the member for Kooyong that fuel emission standards are a gap in Australia's policy framework, and I was very pleased and very heartened to hear the very forward-leaning comments made by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy in the significant work on fuel emissions standards he has done since coming into office just over 100 days ago. I look forward to the government doing more work and having constructive engagement with members like the member for Kooyong to help achieve this for our country.

In Macnamara, in Port Melbourne, we have a proud history of manufacturing Australian cars. Holden was based in Port Melbourne for decades. I was actually in this building working as a staff member on the very famous day in 2014 that then treasurer Joe Hockey famously goaded the Australian car industry to leave our shores. At the time, we had quite a high Australian dollar and the price of our vehicles was high but we knew that that was going to pass and that the Australian products were going to become competitive again as they had been during fluctuations throughout history. Instead of backing in Australian manufacturing and instead of backing in Australian jobs and Australia's research and development industries, the then government goaded the car industry to leave, and that's exactly what happened. And, in Macnamara—

I could get into an argument with the interjections from the member for La Trobe about the ways in which they have spent millions of dollars. These are the people who spent $5.5 billion not to build a submarine. Let's not get into that debate.

When talking about the car industry, in Macnamara we are talking about what was the largest employer not just of people on the floor of our auto manufacturers—really good, solid jobs assembling pieces of Australian machinery—but the largest employer of researchers and developers in the country. This industry, our car manufacturing, employed more engineers and research and development people than any other industry. It was a massive investment in Australian capability, in Australian thought, in Australian science and in Australian engineering, and it's gone. We have a lot of work to do to get it back. But electric vehicles, components of electric vehicles and subsidiary businesses that can feed into supply chains for electric vehicles are a really exciting chance for Australia to be able to get back into the manufacturing of vehicles.

This bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022, goes to taxation reform. It goes to taxation reform because electric vehicles are too expensive for Australian consumers but the demand by Australians is massive. If you go to Toyota right now and say you want either a hybrid or an electric vehicle, you're talking about a two-year wait at least. To get a Tesla it's a 12 month wait. To get an electric vehicle from Hyundai it's a two-year wait. The supply chains are quite pressed. But it's also because Australia hasn't been welcoming. Due to a range of issues—like fuel emissions standards and incentives for car companies to produce affordable electric vehicles for the Australian market—we are in a position now where we have one of the worst ratios of electric vehicles to fuel combustion vehicles anywhere in the developed world. You stop and ask yourself: why on earth are we in this situation in Australia, a relatively wealthy and successful nation that likes its car? If you've been in an electric vehicle, you know it's a pretty exciting, turbulent ride in some of them. Why on earth are we in this situation where Australians don't have access to affordable electric vehicles? Part of it is because of the price, and this bill obviously addresses some of the tax concessions.

Let me read you some of the politics that have occurred in the electric vehicle realm or ecosystem over the last years. In November 2021, we were reminded that in April 2019 the then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison—the member for Cook—said:

Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles …

I don't even know how an EV ends the weekend, but that was the attitude of the former Prime Minister, who then had the gall to deny in a later video that he had ever said that, as if we couldn't get the footage of him saying that and put it next to the footage of him denying saying that in the same video. Then there was the former Attorney-General Senator Cash, who said this:

We are going to stand by our tradies and we are going to save their utes.

I don't even know what that means, but it's absolutely absurd. Most recently, there was a doozy made by the new Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, the former Minister for the Environment, who said:

And no one in the world is making an electric ute, by the way, and even if they were it would be unaffordable.

Well, it is astonishing. Mitsubishi and, I think, Ford are making electric utes. There are a number of car manufacturers, including General Motors, making electric utes. Those opposite have not only had a history of goading the car industry off our shores—

I take the interjections from the member for La Trobe. I am not talking about the member for Kooyong or the member for Mackellar; I'm talking about him and his ridiculous team's attitude towards electric vehicles over the last decade, which meant that we not only lost car manufacturing in this country, including in my electorate with the Holden plant, but also lost progress, opportunity and the possibility for Australian manufacturers, as well as Australian consumers, to have access to electric vehicles.

We are going to change that. We are going to make electric vehicles more affordable. As the member for Corangamite correctly said, there are no electric cars available in Australia under $40,000. In a time of high inflation and stretched household budgets, it is simply not an option for Australian households to be spending more than $40,000. In fact, $40,000 is way too expensive.

Think about some of the young people as well. When I walk around Macnamara and I speak to young people—and I'm sure members in this Chamber would have had a similar experience—you find that the idea of treading softly on our planet and leaving as small a footprint as we possibly can is something that is deeply personal to our fellow Australians, including our young Australians. Yet they have absolutely no ability to purchase an electric vehicle. They are completely priced out of the market, and many of them rely on a vehicle to work and to go to their place of employment. We need to change that. It needs to be affordable for young Australians.

A part of that is making it cheaper, and the other part of it is producing and purchasing as many electric vehicles as possible as part of government fleets. We use government fleets for about three years and then we put them into the second-hand market. We need good, reliable, relatively new cars to be entering the second-hand market to produce downward pressure on car prices and to address some of the supply chain issues.

I hope that for young people we're able to address the affordability of electric vehicles, because other countries have. Other countries have had an aggressive policy where they have sought to pursue incentives for car manufacturers to increase fuel emission standards but also to incentivise electric vehicles and to have a range of policies that make electric vehicles more affordable and more accessible for their citizens. We in Australia need to catch up, because we should be making car components in Australia. We should be making all of the components.

There is a famous score called the Harvard score of economic complexity which basically looks at how much value we are adding into our economy. Right at the top you have Japan, a high-tech economy, constantly looking at ways to add science and mechanics to their products. You then have South Korea, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland. These are the countries at the top of the Harvard score of economic complexity. Even the United States, with Silicon Valley; and the United Kingdom, with many of their advanced technologies, are at No. 10 or No. 11. Australia, I believe, currently is at No. 86, in between Paraguay and Uzbekistan. No offence to our Uzbek and Paraguayan friends, but we really should be better than that. We really shouldn't just have an economy where we dig things up and sell them off to another country to add value over there. We should be adding value in Australia.

To incentivise and engage constructively with industry and to make electric vehicles a product that Australians are not only making but purchasing is something that is so important for Australian businesses, for the future of Australian manufacturing and for the future of our efforts to tackle climate change. Vehicle emissions account for roughly 10 per cent of our emissions as a country. We need to change that. We need to put more electricity into the grid so we that we can have access to them, and a good way to start that work is via this bill. I would encourage all members of the House to support it. It's an excellent piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

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