Henry Pike (Bowman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. The managing director of Mazda Australia, Vinesh Bhindi, has said of Labor's new family car and ute tax:

… the timeframe is too ambitious, and secondly maybe the government hasn't really educated themselves on the costs that would go to the consumer …

Yet the Minister for Climate Change and Energy has said, 'No particular model will go up.' Who is right—the managing director of Mazda or the minister for climate change?

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bowman for that question. It feels a bit like groundhog day. These are the same people that said that, frankly, the minimum wage would wreck the economy, tax cuts for all Australians was Marxist economics and a war on hardworking Australians, and the weekend would be over and there'd be no more barbeques for everybody. We all know that what those opposite say is, frankly, demonstrably untrue. Now, of course, we are seeing it again. Instead of making claims that they know are false, those opposite need to explain why they think hardworking Australians should be denied access to cars that are cheaper to run. That is the campaign that those opposite are running. They need to explain why he wants Australians buying a new car to pay more for petrol than they need to.

Again, I want to quote a very auspicious Australian, I will say, on this matter. They're someone who might have known a thing or two about the introduction of fuel efficiency standards. I remind the House that, when this very good member at the time stated they were looking to introduce fuel efficiency standards, this is what they said:

… when fuel efficiency standards were introduced in the US, the most popular models before introduction stayed the most popular models after introduction … what we'd call utes … There wasn't a material change in price and we don't expect that there would be a material change in price here.

Who said that? That was, of course, the member for Bradfield, when he was introducing the fuel efficiency standards back I think in 2018.

We know that Australians are missing out on fuel savings because those opposite did not have the courage of their convictions when it came to fuel efficiency standards. Right now Australians are missing out on millions of dollars of fuel savings that they could have saved if this government had actually pursued at. On this side of the House we want Australians to have greater choice of new vehicles and to spend less of their hard earned cash on fuel.