Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Much as I like and admire my colleague the member for Bruce, there was much in his contribution—he would be unsurprised to hear—that I disagree with. One of the things I find interesting in this whole debate is the lack of willingness to dig down into the detail of how we actually get to this point. I'll make the observation at the outset that I have no issue with electric vehicles. As the member for New England said in his contribution, if you want to go and buy an electric vehicle, knock yourself out and go and buy one. But I have many, many people in my electorate of Forde who would not even think about buying an electric vehicle, because they cannot afford it. They work in jobs where salary sacrificing and even discussion of fringe benefits is not an option. They wouldn't know what a novated lease or a salary packaging plan is, because they just do not work in industries or in jobs where those opportunities are afforded. So how are they going to benefit from this policy? They are not going to benefit.

The worst thing is, if we continue to go down this road and we continue, over time, to increasingly restrict access to internal-combustion-engine-powered vehicles, and second-hand models of those vehicles, as a consequence, become more expensive, for people on low to moderate incomes in my electorate, their cost of living is not going to go down; it is going to go up, because they will have to pay more for the vehicles that they can afford to buy or that they will increasingly struggle to buy. And increasingly, I would argue, they are going to pay more for fuel for their vehicles. These people will not benefit from this policy. And, at the end of September, this government is not going to continue the fuel excise discount that we instituted when we were last in government. So people in my electorate who are on low to moderate incomes are going to pay double. They're not going to benefit from this policy, and they're going to pay higher fuel prices from the end of September. So is it any wonder that we on this side of the House stand here and debate the merits of this policy? It's our responsibility to debate the merits of this policy, when people in electorates like mine and those of my colleagues across this country are going to pay the price of this policy.

I would go further and touch on some other claims that were made by the member for Bruce in relation to pollution and the impacts of internal combustion engine vehicles. I've been round long enough to have seen the massive improvements we've made in the last 30 or 40 years in the level of pollution that comes out of our vehicle fleet, whether it is our cars or our trucks. I can remember many an occasion, driving from Beenleigh into Brisbane, when you couldn't see the skyscrapers in the city of Brisbane because of the smog, because of the pollution. I can't remember when we last had a smog day in Brisbane because of pollution from motor vehicle exhausts. For that matter, I can't remember that happening in Sydney or Melbourne. Do we still have days with smog from bushfires and fog and other things? Yes, we do, but the incidence of those events as a direct result of vehicular pollution today are extraordinarily rare, and that shows me that we as a nation over the past 30 to 40 years have done an extraordinary job in improving the air quality and emissions standards from our vehicles.

The other thing that I find interesting in this debate about providing subsidies to electric vehicles is we seem to have gone into an age of subsidy for a whole range of things. As I look back through history—because history is a wonderful teacher about what we can do better or do differently—I question the need to subsidise electric vehicles, because we never subsidised the Model T Ford—

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