Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Electoral Matters) | Hansard source

We find ourselves in here to have a pretty extraordinary debate. For the first time—I think in Australian history—the government is taxing Australians and sending that money to China. You heard right. Under the Labor government's car and ute tax, ordinary Australians are being penalised for driving petrol or diesel internal combustion cars, and the money that they are being levied is being dispatched to Chinese manufacturers of EVs.

If that wasn't extraordinary enough, we also find ourselves listening to Labor MPs crowing about the fringe benefits tax exemptions that have been afforded to EVs in recent years. Those same exemptions made a Tesla cheaper for a surgeon than for a nurse. That is an appalling breach of faith against the Australian people, and I do think it is extraordinary that the government continues to defend the indefensible when it comes to EVs.

Admittedly, with all of these subsidies and taxpayer funded largesse, EV uptake has increased. Indeed, from a very low starting point, it just crept above 12 per cent for the 2025 year in car sales, which still means that the overwhelming majority of Australians are purchasing internal combustion engine vehicles. Indeed, in my part of the world and that of the member for Grey, here, our communities rely on internal combustion engines, whether it's for travelling the vast distances in our electorates, getting around the farm or lugging the boat down to enjoy the pristine waters of Geographe Bay on a weekend. These are the choices that Australians ought to be able to make for themselves without facing a tax impost or a fee levy from the Albanese Labor government.

We find ourselves now with about 410,000 EVs in Australia compared to the many millions of conventional cars that Australians still choose overwhelmingly to purchase for their own use. The government is overstating, I think, how widespread and accessible the transition really is, because upfront cost remains a major and ongoing barrier for many households considering an EV. This is because EVs typically cost between $10,000 and $15,000 more than a comparable petrol model.

That price difference is particularly significant at a time when families are dealing with sustained cost-of-living pressures, fuelled by the Albanese government's out-of-control spending and the inflation that it is causing, which is running rampant in the economy and seeing the worst decline in living standards in the developed world. The government's claims about affordability are not being felt in the community. That's because, when it comes to the Labor Party, you must look at what they do, not listen to what they say.

Many Australians don't have the capability to reach into their pockets and fork out for an expensive EV and an expensive charger, because any savings from running an EV depend heavily on access to cheap and reliable charging. That necessarily means that renters, apartment residents and those without off-street parking face real and ongoing barriers to cheap and reliable charging. Those challenges are even more pronounced in regional and rural communities like mine. Australia has currently got an estimated 1,500 fast-charging sites nationwide. For a country as large and as decentralised as Australia, that network is still very thin, representing less than two chargers available per 10,000 people in the country.

But the bigger issue is not the number of chargers but where they are actually located, because most charging infrastructure is concentrated in the capital cities and not out in the regions, where my community live. Only one-third of towns have access to a charger within 20 kilometres, and more than two-thirds of towns have no charger at all within five kilometres. That means there are stretches of hundreds of kilometres without access to a single fast charger, which makes EV ownership totally impractical for regional Australians, who rely more heavily on the types of utes, four-wheel drives and other internal combustion vehicles I referred to earlier.

For the government to crow about a scheme which, as I said, made Teslas cheaper for surgeons than for nurses and to throw hundreds of millions of dollars a year—and climbing—towards Chinese manufacturers, money that was taken from hardworking Australians, it does expose this EV fantasy for what it really is.

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