Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's great to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2002, another instalment in the rapid progress that the Albanese Labor government is making to help decarbonise Australia and make sure that Australian households and businesses are able to participate in one of the great changes of the 21st century. To some degree, you could say that this is enabling households and businesses to get on board with a trend that is without question a significant part of our future and the world's future, but in many ways it's not really in the distant future—it's happening today in lots of other countries to a massive extent, but not in Australia.

We've fallen terribly behind. It means that Australians miss out on savings in terms of running costs, especially in the face of volatile fuel prices. It means we're not getting the benefits in terms of emission reduction, and we need to make emission reductions in lots of parts of Australian life. So far, the reductions that have been made—which have not been enough—have been in the energy generation space and in foregoing planned land-clearing, but we've made virtually no progress in terms of emission reductions in other sectors like transport, agriculture, industry and others. This will contribute to that.

There's no doubt, as the previous speaker said, that vehicle pollution is a big issue. It's a massive issue around the world, but it's a big issue here in Australia, not least because we don't have some of the fuel standards and related emission standards that are pretty common in other parts of the world. We shouldn't kid ourselves just because we live in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart or Darwin. We might think, 'It's not Mexico City or New Delhi—it's not a megalopolis which we tend to associate with the impacts of poor air quality, vehicle emissions and pollution.' The reality is that, by many measures, people in Australian cities are being exposed to unhealthy levels of vehicle emissions. That is something that we will address as we move to decarbonise our transport sector, moving off hydrocarbons and into electric vehicles and, potentially, hydrogen vehicles.

It's also really important for liquid fuel security, something I've spoken about throughout my time in parliament. We really should hold on to that. Australia is extraordinarily dependent on liquid fuel. We are the only nation that has been way out of compliance with the IAEA fuel stockholding requirements for a long time. It's very hard to see when we'll ever get back into compliance. We've made a commitment to do that by 2026, but the previous government didn't do much on that front. Mining and agriculture in Australia is 90 per cent reliant on liquid fuel and our transport sector is 99 per cent reliant on liquid fuel.

Of course, when it comes to electric cars at the household level—for passengers, in households around the country—we are in a woeful position. We are by capita the third-highest owners of vehicles in the OECD, but we have one-seventh of the uptake of electric vehicles of car-loving countries like the United States and Canada. Really, there is only one reason why we are in that terrible state, and it is because of this bizarre blind spot, if you want to be kind, that the previous government suffered. You can see it is a blind spot. You can see that it is irrational, delusional and all of those things by the way the members of the former government and members of the current opposition talk about this issue—even after the election. In recent weeks, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party boldly made the claim that there were no electric utes available—that they were not in production, that they couldn't be bought and that they didn't exist on planet Earth. That is just bizarre as well as categorically wrong.

You can only make those kinds of statements when you have gone off into a kind of 'la la land' where you have taken a particular, twisted, baseless sort of view of world and you're going to prosecute that over and over in the face of science, evidence, rationality and everything else. It is a pattern of behaviour that we saw from the former government in lots of areas. We certainly saw it on almost anything to do with climate change or renewable energy, and we certainly saw it in relation to electric vehicles—these wild claims that they would end the weekend; that they did not exist; that they weren't viable; that they would never happen—while the rest of the world marched ahead.

So what is the result? If you look at our performance in an area like household solar, we see that we are literally the world leader, because the former Labor government decided it was time to make a change and get us on the path of sensible renewable energy at the household level, and that kicked off a home solar revolution. We went from having fewer than 12,000 households with solar PV in Australia in 2007, at the end of the Howard government, to two or three million plus now. We have the highest level of household solar penetration in the world, and it has begun to make a significant difference both in reducing our reliance on power that is generated by hydrocarbons but also in decentralising our power system and giving households relief from cost pressures. Electric vehicles will do exactly the same.

We had to change the government to get something done because, until that happened, Australia was being steered by people who were literally making things up and inflicting their weird daydreams or nightmares or whatever you want to call it on the Australian people. Apart from the fact that it has meant that we now start from this position behind many other countries in the OECD, it has meant that, while we talk about cost-of-living pressures at the moment, many more Australian households and businesses are at the behest of global fuel prices. If only a sensible approach had been taken to this issue a decade ago, many fewer businesses and households would be exposed and vulnerable in that way.

It has also meant that, at various times over the last three or four years, we have had liquid fuel coverage, in terms of petrol and diesel that is not much more than three weeks—somewhere around 21 or 22 days. If for any reason there was interruption to our supply of liquid fuel, there would be a crisis in this country—and I say this cautiously—that would make some aspects of what we experienced through the pandemic actually look pretty mild by comparison. Our transport sector is 99 per cent reliant on liquid fuels and most of what moves around in this country moves around by road or by rail. We've gone from having five refineries not that long ago to having two refineries, so we can't import crude and refine it ourselves to the same degree. We're more reliant on imported, refined fuel, which of course has a shorter shelf life. That's made our liquid fuel insecurity more fraught.

So there are lots of reasons to make this change. It's not, as the other side would have it, so that people can indulge in some personal consumer choice. That has literally nothing to do with it. It is so that we can be part of a global industrial change that has marched on a long way already, and we are miles behind. We are miles behind because of that delusional stance by the previous government, and it's had an impact on people's bottom line and it's made us more vulnerable. This government's not going to do that. This government is doing something about it within a short time. We're beyond the 100-day mark now, but not much beyond it.

This bill will make electric cars cheaper and will increase the supply of electric cars. In keeping with the approach that we've taken to a number of areas, we're doing something right now, but we're also looking at the changes that need to be made in the medium and longer term. We've got the discussion paper out on the National Electric Vehicle Strategy. We've said that we're going to use the weight and the influence of government procurement contracting, leadership in government procurement contracting, for a target to ensure, quite rightly, that 75 per cent of government fleets are electric by 2025.

We've made a commitment to a national charging network, which is obviously critical as people take up electric vehicles and need to be able to go further and further afield. I can say as someone who comes from Western Australia that that is critical, not just because once you leave metro Perth you are in rural and regional Western Australia but also because we are the largest and the most remote state. I know from electric car purchasers and car-owner groups in my electorate and in Western Australia more broadly that they want to see that network extended. Some of them have actually crowdfunded and used other fund-sourcing methods to put charging-point infrastructure out in rural and regional Western Australia so that they can drive their vehicles further.

All of these things are being done to address what has been a terrible blind spot in our technological and transport policy settings.

I welcome this bill. I think it's momentous. I know that people in my community will benefit from it. I know that businesses will benefit from it. And I know that it actually improves our liquid fuel security, which is a serious vulnerability that, for all the chest beating that sometimes happens on the other side, has been neglected for 10 years.

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