Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I rise to take note of the response tabled earlier today on the new fuel or vehicle emissions standards. While the government has a lot to hide on its plans to jack up car prices across Australia, it has decided to introduce the world's most aggressive emission limits on vehicles here in Australia that will penalise all Australians that are seeking simply to buy a car for their families, some to just go about and do their jobs as trades men or women or farmers or miners—people who have to have large vehicles to make money for their families and for our nation.

The government continually says that these new emission limits, these so-called new vehicle efficiency standards, will not raise the cost of cars because there is a similar scheme that operates in the United States. They have said this on repeat. It's obviously something in the first line of the talking points that have been provided by the minister's office. I doubt many of them have actually looked at what has happened in the US or how their scheme works. It became clear at Senate estimates a couple of weeks ago that the system the government is proposing is very different from what has operated in the United States.

The government is proposing a reduction in emission limits for Australian vehicles of more than 60 per cent over the next five years, so emission limits have to come down by more than half over the next five years. In the United States, in the last five years their scheme has only reduced emission limits by 25 per cent, so our scheme is double the impact of the US just to start with. On the other side of it too, under the government's scheme, car manufacturers will pay a penalty if their cars are sold above the limit. Of course, those penalties will be passed on to you as the consumer. The size of that penalty under the government's scheme is $100 per gram of carbon dioxide over the limits. That fine is actually three times the level that has applied in the US to date. On top of that, on another side of things, in the US, large vehicles like the RAMs and the F-150s that a lot of trades men and women use in the US are exempt. They're exempt from the US scheme! Here in Australia, your four-wheel drives, your LandCruisers, your Ford Rangers and your Toyota HiLuxes are all under the scheme. The government's distraction here—'Just look to the US'—does not hold water at all.

That's why the Senate has asked the government to produce the documents and produce the modelling associated with their proposed scheme so we can actually see what the impact on car prices will be. But, surprise, surprise, the government is refusing to release this information because, they say, it's a cabinet document. It's part of cabinet deliberations. This is a total abuse of the Senate's powers. It's an abuse of the orders that have been previously decided upon in this place. A government cannot and should not be able to just declare that any document is a cabinet document and therefore keep it hidden from the Australian people. This is simple. All we're asking for are the calculations that have been done to show the effect of the government's scheme. There is nothing secret here. There is nothing of national security interest. This material was funded by taxpayers and should be able to be viewed by taxpayers. There is no justification to keep it hidden.

In the limited time I've got, I just want to demonstrate why the government is keeping this hidden. The most popular car for sale last year was the Ford Ranger. It emits 188 grams of carbon dioxide a year. The government want to impose a limit on this car in 2029 of 81 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre. The Ford Ranger will be 107 grams over the limit. At a charge of $100 a gram, as I said earlier, that works out to be $10,700. These are the government's own figures. They're very simple calculations. We just want to see the modelling. There is a little bit more complexity to this, which I'll come to, but it's $10,700 extra that people will be asked to pay for a Ford Ranger.

As I said, a lot of people out there in our community have to buy a Ford Ranger. They have to buy a ute of that sort of size and weight to do their jobs as plumbers, as builders, as bricklayers or as farmers. Some farmers will need a four-wheel drive even more. You get a bigger impact on a four-wheel drive. You need those types of vehicles. There are no EV alternatives that can suit the purposes of a bricklayer in this country.

Yes, the government says that the cars—the Toyota HiLuxes and the Ford Rangers—will get more efficient over time, but they won't get more efficient to the tune of 100 grams of carbon dioxide reduction. They won't get more efficient to the tune of a 60 per cent reduction. Even if they get more efficient at a reasonable rate, it'll still mean thousands of dollars more in cost. We deserve to know exactly what the government's numbers are. What has the government been told on how much the extra cost will be? If it wasn't an extra cost, they'd be releasing this modelling—no doubt about it. The only reason they're keeping it hidden is they have something to hide in their plans to make us pay more for cars.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take this opportunity to speak on this. Just yesterday I was a guest of the Caravan Industry Association at their show down in Melbourne; I stopped in on my way from Perth to Canberra yesterday. I went and had a look at this industry. It is an enormous industry. Did you know that 93 per cent of the caravans driving around in Australia are manufactured in Victoria alone, in the suburbs of Campbellfield and Epping? It's an enormous industry, and it employs tens of thousands of people. You think of the country towns that are benefited by people travelling on their holidays, whether they be young families or grey nomads, as they often like to be called—well, maybe they don't like to be called that, but they are often referred to as that. The reality is this policy the government is bringing in is going to have a very significant impact upon that industry and upon people's lifestyles.

As Senator Canavan was saying, there is no equivalent, when it comes to electric vehicles, that will be able to handle the loads required or the heavy loads on the back of a ute or on the back of a towbar, when they will be towing a caravan or boat around the country. It's just not practical. Yes, these EVs have the torque that is available, and they can tow up to, in some cases, like the F-150 Lightning, 4½ tonnes, but you can only tow for about 100 kilometres before you've got to recharge. The battery in an F-150 Lightning weighs 900 kilos. That 900-kilo battery is being hauled around, with extra wear and tear on the roads. Imagine having an accident with a car that heavy. And you know what? The gravimetric energy density of that battery is only 250 watt hours per kilogram compared to fuel, which is 11,700. So that 900-kilo battery is equivalent to 18 litres of fuel.

In my home state, where we like to go out in the great outdoors, in July it's like a great exodus from Perth; people go up north to places like Ningaloo, which is about a 1,300-kilometre drive. Can you imagine, every hour, having to pull over and recharge your vehicle. There's nothing, even on the periphery of science, of technology, that is going to see a tenfold increase in the energy density of batteries. The problem is you've got this enormous battery of about 120 kilowatt hours in an F-150 Lightning—that's a big American truck, mind you; it's bigger than a HiLux or a Ranger. Imagine having to recharge that. That's twice the size of a Tesla battery. It would take three hours to recharge that battery.

When we go up—and we go up most Julys and have done for many, many years; we have towed our caravan up to Exmouth—there's a fuel stop that we have to stop at, because you can't make it to the next location, between Geraldton and Carnarvon. It's called the Billabong Roadhouse. When you go up there in the middle of the July school holidays, you've got to wait about half an hour to get fuel—and that's assuming it only takes maybe five minutes to refuel a petrol tank. Imagine if the queue of cars that needed to recharge at that point all had to wait three hours. Imagine the size of the power station you'd have to build right next door to it to ensure that you had enough throughput and enough ability to charge multiple vehicles all at once. Imagine the size of the power station you would need right there; I bet it would be a diesel powered power station! It's just completely impractical.

I met with the association yesterday. They're optimistic about the future, but the innovation that's required to solve this problem is not coming in the next two or three years. The policy that the government is bringing in is imposing the cost on purchases of vehicles in the next couple of years. There is no innovation, even on the horizon, that would deal with the very practical limitations. I haven't even talked about tradies who need to carry heavy equipment to do their job. A reason why tools are heavy is because they have heavy work to do. (Time expired)

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on this proposed legislation, which is basically a tax on productivity. It's a tax on productivity, and it is a tax on working-class Australians. Yet again, it's another one of these costs that will be passed through the economy. It's an attack on the building sector, because many tradies use utes. I'll be honest here; I'm not against making utes smaller so they fit in car parking spots. I'm not against that at all. But when it comes to taxing utes and those vehicles that carry loads and do the lifting, I have said many times in this chamber that we need to get back on the tools in this country. We need to stop the paper shuffling, the wallowing in self-pity, the indoctrination and all of this stuff and actually get back out there building houses and more factories, and this idea will only make that harder. Why? Because it's an increased tax, and it's increased regulation.

What's annoying about this is that the Labor Party and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, and the Prime Minister won't actually release the modelling that will show how much extra it will cost for tradies to go about and do their job. I don't know what's happened to the Labor Party. They used to be the party for the working class, yet we've seen over the last few decades that they've forgotten about their original base, the working-class Australians, who are migrating in droves. We saw that originally under the Howard battlers. They never forgot what Hawke and Keating did to them with the Button plan in 1985, and we're seeing this trend—the migration of working-class Australians over to the Liberal party—because we get it. We know that there is no substitute for productivity in this country and that this tax, which is basically what this proposed legislation is, is only going to make it harder for hardworking Australians, like our tradies, to go out there. God knows, we need them. We don't want any more people going to university and coming out brainwashed and broke when they're 22. We need more hardworking tradies in this country, and I fear that this proposed legislation will destroy hardworking Australians.

Question agreed to.