Russell Broadbent (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight because there was a very good article in The Australian today, on page 20: 'The electric vehicle narrative fails to tell the full story', by Chris Mitchell. I was drawn to one particular paragraph:

The rise of EVs also raises equity concerns in car markets. They are more expensive than traditional cars, driven by the wealthy and subsidised by governments. They are in effect a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

I've been watching, in my time in this parliament—it has been on and off since 1990—the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the name of the environment, and in the name of reductions of emission. The article makes some very, very good points:

The larger problem for the world, and for the car industries of many first world nations, is China's rapid rise towards becoming the world's number two car maker. Many of its new overseas sales are EVs. This industrial transformation is built on soaring fossil fuel power use in China.

And who do we sell our coal to—our essential and amazing coal? To China. The article says:

As this column has observed, essentially Europe has been outsourcing its polluting industries to China and India for decades. This reduces CO2 emissions in Europe and destroys jobs for European workers but at no net benefit to the planet because European companies are simply making goods in highly polluting countries with lower environmental standards than the UK and EU.

That's us. We're doing the same thing. The article continues:

European car makers such as Volkswagen, BMW and Ford Europe are moving production to the US, and more models to China, as power prices in Europe make local production unviable.

US President Joe Biden's new green subsidies are accelerating the move to the US. The Guardian reported on January 30 that the UK electric van start-up Arrival would cut 800 jobs—about half its workforce—as it sought US expansion to take advantage of green subsidies.

  …   …   …

Meanwhile, the Greens here want Australia to stop all new coal mines when coal is our number two export earner, ban expansion of gas exploration and production when we are the world's largest natural gas supplier, and reject domestic nuclear power when we have 37 per cent of world uranium reserves.

You couldn't write this stuff yourself, as to the track that the Australian community is going down. As Chris Mitchell says here, beautifully:

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, Western governments, our own included, are not just shutting down reliable fossil fuel power generation but are moving to renewables products largely manufactured in China, again with expanding Chinese fossil fuel use. China makes more than 80 per cent of the world's solar panels, many manufactured using slave labour in western China. It also dominates the global market for wind turbines, making 70 per of world supply.

In all areas, governments of all persuasions, be they Liberal, Nationals or Labor governments in this country or be they independents—it seems that we are determined to stand on our own toes the whole time when we consider the overall pattern. All of these processes—you have your panels on your roof and you're getting the subsidies, but who is paying the higher prices? It is the lower socio-economic people in our community that are paying the higher prices. The poor are paying for the wealthy in too many areas in this country, and it has to stop. Electric vehicle subsidisation is exactly that. Our government did it when it decided to subsidise charging posts. This government has again transferred money from the poor, from the Commonwealth of this nation, to the wealthiest people in the community. And how many cars are they driving in this country? Last year, 3.1 per cent of car sales were electric vehicles, which makes them about 0.07 of the car fleet in Australia. This is wrong. It should stop. There should be further consideration of these matters.

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