Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When a breakthrough arrives, according to Pulitzer Prize winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, 'technology dissolves its own past'. The adoption of electric vehicles in Australia will be akin to switching from analog to smart phones. It will be a step change in transport that will liberate us from the irritations of the nozzle. But that's not all. We can look forward to breathing cleaner air, free from particulates and carcinogens that come from Australian cars burning some of the cheapest but dirtiest fuel in the world. Australia is only one of six countries in the OECD to not have vehicle emissions standards. For example, our unleaded petrol has 15 times the level of sulphur in similar fuel in Europe. As a result, we have been denied the most fuel efficient and environmentally friendly cars by European car makers.

The previous, coalition government established a ministerial forum on vehicle emissions in 2015. And what did it deliver? Nothing. As a result, Australians fell further behind in the electric vehicle race and are now in the pincer grip of high fuel prices and cost-of-living pressures. The lack of policy certainty has meant that, while consumers in the UK have access to 26 low-emissions vehicles under $60,000, in Australia we have access to only eight.

Our government is determined to change all of this. In the way that we have a world of choice at our fingertips, we want to give Australians a world of choice when it comes to electric vehicles. At present, getting these cars is like The Hunger Games. Meagre offerings are selling out in minutes, much like grand-final tickets. However, the EV roadshow is getting underway, and tickets are selling fast. We have acted to make EVs cheaper by removing the five per cent import tariff for cars below the luxury tax threshold. The removal of fringe benefits tax will make electric vehicles more attractive to employers by shaving $12,000 off the cost of a Tesla Model 3, for example.

We have also committed $500 million to establishing a national EV-charging network with charge points every 150 kilometres. In Higgins, we have seven public EV charge points. It's an embarrassment, but it's going to change. We will create a national hydrogen-fuelling network, and flip the Commonwealth fleet, aiming for 75 per cent low-emission vehicles on new leases by 2025. This will have the ancillary benefit of boosting the second-hand car market once these leases expire. Improving our fuel standards is also on our radar.

It is entirely conceivable that the young Aussie kids of today will learn to drive on EVs—lucky them. But it's the commitments that we make today, not luck, that will make this a reality.