David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022. I'll start with a framing of where we're at. We're facing a climate crisis. We turn on the news and see the results of that every day. It's not going to get better. Clearly, Australia has to lift its game when it comes to the transition away from fossil fuels to a clean energy future. Australians are also faced with a cost-of-living crisis where households across the country are having to make really tough decisions, when it comes to their weekly budgets, on what they spend money on.

Electrification is a huge opportunity not only for Australia but also, at a household level, for households to save money. If you look at rooftop solar in Australia, we now have some of the cheapest—if not the cheapest—rooftop solar in the world. Australian households are benefiting from that. They continue to install solar and reap the benefits of lower power bills. That policy started under the Howard government, and has had bipartisan support in developing the certification systems, bringing down the price of installation, and putting into practice the work and amazing innovation of some of our best scientists in Australia to improve the efficient of solar PV cells.

Clearly, Australians want electric vehicles. The demand far outstrips supply. It's no surprise that Australians want electric vehicles. According to the Australian Automobile Association, households spend more than $100 on average per week on fuel. That's more than $5,000 a year every year. The recent restoration of the full fuel excise charge will ensure that prices remain high for petrol and diesel. That money that Australians spend on fuel doesn't stay in Australia. Most of the tens of billions of dollars spent on fuel flows back to oil-producing countries. It's bad not only for the economy but also for our energy security. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has reported that our fuel stockpile has been as low as 20 days in recent years, well below the 90-day requirement set by the International Energy Agency. It's no wonder that Chris Barrie, former Chief of the Defence Force, said that climate change is the greatest threat to our national security. And yet we continue to power our cars with dirty, imported fuel from insecure supply chains, rather than from clean Australian wind and sunshine—sunshine that can be captured on your roof at home and put into your electric vehicle.

The rest of the developed world have seen the writing on the wall and have been shifting to electric vehicles at pace. In Europe, EV sales make up 17 per cent of the market now. In countries like Norway it's as high as 86 per cent. Even in the fuel-hungry United States, electric-vehicle sales now make up more than six per cent of the market. Here in Australia, electric vehicles make up two per cent of the market, at least for the figures we have for last year. Slow adoption of EVs is costing Australians money. It's costing Australians money every time they go to the fuel pump, and it is causing damage to our climate. We have to look at the transition to EVs in the context of climate change. This is something that we have to rapidly speed up.

The bulk of the 18.6 per cent of Australia's total emissions due to transport come from light vehicles. Our cars are highly polluting. The average Australian car is 45 per cent more emissions-intensive than the European equivalent. If we're to reach net zero by 2050, we clearly have to do better and we have to move fast. Research by the Grattan Institute shows that, to get to net zero, EVs need to make up 100 per cent of light vehicle sales by 2035 at the latest.

Australians are ready to make the change. Earlier this month, an NRMA survey showed that 57 per cent of respondents would consider purchasing an EV. But, as we all know, one significant issue is that there is a shortfall in supply. In the ACT, the wait on a Hyundai Kona is now 12 months. Manufacturers like Hyundai don't want to send great numbers of affordable electric vehicles to Australia, because it's currently not an attractive market. Why is that? It's because we continue to see scaremongering and still have poor policy settings that make us a dumping ground for a whole range of inefficient clunkers that we see on the road. Leadership and action is needed to move us from the back of the queue up to the front of the queue when it comes to the electric vehicles.

By far, the biggest issue that we need to deal with to change that is to have fuel efficiency standards. Australia is one of only two OECD countries that do not have fuel efficiency standards. The other country is Russia. In 2014, the Climate Change Authority under the Abbott Government recommended introducing fuel efficiency standards, and modelling shows that the standard would have had a net benefit to the economy of $13.9 billion had that recommendation been implemented by policymakers.

We need to act now. We have an opportunity to act and to start realising this benefit. It's great to see Minister Bowen and the government commit to fuel efficiency standards to drive the change that we need. We need independent, robust and ambitious fuel efficiency standards. We need them to ensure that these standards have integrity. They need to be mandatory to ensure standards apply fairly across different manufacturers, and they must be based on real-world driving patterns. Recent research of SUVs in Sydney shows that actual emissions are up to 65 per cent higher than claimed by manufacturers. Indeed, we've seen in the news over recent history vehicle manufacturers being caught out for fudging the numbers. The same standard should be implemented for all passenger vehicles without exception. Finally, it should be based on and monitored by independent and publicly accessible data. I'll continue to work to encourage the government to move swiftly to bring on these fuel efficiency standards that have integrity, alongside a world-class fuel efficiency standard. The government needs to move quickly to improve EV charging infrastructure across the country. In our cities many people are renting or are in apartment buildings without charging infrastructure. In regional and remote Australia, range anxiety acts as a barrier to the uptake of electric vehicles.

Progress reported.