Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz has convinced me of the need to support the opposition’s requests for amendments, because they are very sensible. They address the issues that I raised in my speech in the second reading debate on this issue. They allow those people who live in rural and remote Australia to have the safety and usefulness of four-wheel drive vehicles, which are not luxury cars by the standards that one might normally determine luxury cars to be—that is, the Rolls Royces, the BMWs, the big Audis and those sorts of things. As I said in the second reading debate, these four-wheel drive vehicles in rural and regional Australia are indeed workhorses. They are essential for safety and for getting around roads which most people who live in the capital cities would not understand. The roads that these vehicles drive on are very often dirt or poor gravel roads because of a lack of government investment, at state government level principally, over the last 10 years.

In all of my driving out in these parts of the world—and, as I have mentioned, I have just come back from a 10-day, 4,000-kilometre road trip through the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Gulf Country and western Queensland. More than half the roads I travelled on were dirt roads. If you took a Holden or any ordinary family sedan on them—or an Audi or a Rolls Royce, for example—it would be rattled apart in a small number of months. So four-wheel drives are essential. If the rains come, the roads turn into quagmires and you will not get through those in ordinary vehicles. In the dry seasons, they turn into bulldust, and again an ordinary sedan vehicle will not get through it. So you do need a four-wheel drive vehicle. Up in the north and in the west, you need a vehicle with air conditioning—that is not a luxury—and you do need a vehicle with bullbars, spotlights, Shoo Roos and all those things. They are not luxury enhancements; they are enhancements to keep the occupants safe.

As I mentioned before, it is not just the primary production vehicle that you have to look at. It is the vehicle that is used by, for example, the mother taking young children the 40 or 50 kilometres they need to go to get to school. It is okay if you live in the capital city—the school is down the end of the block or you go to the nearest bus stop and the bus drops you at the school. But out in some of these areas where these four-wheel drive vehicles are absolutely essential, mothers take their children 40 or 50 kilometres each day to school, drop them off in the morning, drive home and come back in the afternoon to pick them up.

Those are the sorts of vehicles; they are not the farm vehicles, because the hubby is doing work on the farm with the farm vehicle. This is mum taking the kids to school or mum going to the provisioning store in the closest town, which in many instances could be 100 kilometres away. These things are not considered by those who draft these laws. Senator Abetz’s requests will cover all of those sorts of things. If we are going to have an increased luxury car tax then we should take it to $90,000 and you will cover all of that.

I want to ask Senator Fielding before he moves his request: is it in fact only the vehicle used on the farm that is the subject of your request or is it any vehicle? Is it just one vehicle a year? On big farms—and some of the properties I have seen in the last few months have been hundreds of thousands of hectares—they would not have just one four-wheel drive. At the place I was at—I will not mention the name—they had a fleet of Toyota vehicles. I would like to know from Senator Fielding what exactly his proposal is? Is it one vehicle a year or is it as many vehicles as you need to run primary production? Or is it as many vehicles as you need to service the primary production, not the ones that you would be throwing your shovel in the back of but the ones that you drive to town to get spare parts, pick up fuel and do things like that?

They are the essential things that need to be addressed. I understand the government is assisting Senator Fielding with his request. Since Senator Fielding is not here perhaps the government could answer just how far that request might go.