Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Industry Research and Development (Dealership and Repairer Initiative for Vehicle Electrification Nationally (DRIVEN) Program) Instrument 2024, made under the Industry Research and Development Act 1986, be disallowed [F2024L01460].

What a mouthful! It's an instrument made under the Industry Research and Development Act 1986. This is where the fun bit starts. This regulation One Nation seeks to revoke is a $60 million slush fund that climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen—there he is again—will have to splash around on pet projects. Specifically, this is $60 million for the installation and repair of electric vehicle chargers. These are electric vehicle chargers from which only some of the most well-off of Australians, who can afford an EV, will benefit. While rents are skyrocketing, houses are more unaffordable than ever, groceries keep getting more expensive and beer is heading towards $15 a pint, taxpayers should not be slugged with more taxes to pay for this government's slush fund.

Why is the government obsessed with putting everyone into electric vehicles? Some of them have decent speed, admittedly, when you put your foot down, yet the range on purely electric vehicles—battery electric vehicles—is mostly terrible. It gets even worse when trying to tow something. Forums for the Ford F-150 Lightning, a battery powered ute, are full of horror stories that unfold as soon as a trailer is attached. This is worldwide.

Australians already know all of this and are voting with their wallets. The rejection of battery EVs shows up in new car sales figures. Battery electric vehicles were just 6.5 per cent of new car sales, and how long have they been offered? Years. Even here, in the capital of 'Wokeistan', Canberra, home of the country's loudest virtue signallers, battery electric vehicles are just 3.6 per cent of all vehicles on the road. This is despite every effort of government and multinational corporations trying to pull Australians away from the trusty petrol and diesel engine. There has been a near decade of propaganda and lies trying to convince Australians to make the switch—we're not buying it.

Never mind the hugely expensive tax breaks that give an EV buyer tens of thousands of dollars. These tax breaks include exemptions from the lower luxury car tax threshold; exemptions from the penalties under the new vehicle efficiency standard, or the ute tax, as it has become known; no fuel excise at 50.8 cents a litre; exemptions from fringe benefits tax, representing a $12,000 saving on a $60,000 EV but costing taxpayers $550 million a year. Taxpayers pay for this. This is Robin Hood in reverse; robbing the poor to pay for the wealthy. Plus there is an array of rebates from state governments across the country. They've thrown just about every tax break in the book at EVs, and still Australians aren't fussed over the inferior electric vehicle products.

More than 95 per cent of the vehicles on the road still contain internal combustion engines, the trusty petrol and diesel, the reliable petrol and diesel, the safe petrol and diesel. Naturally aspirated, turbocharged, supercharged or a hybrid set up, Australians have rightly shunned battery EVs for engines that make a noise when turned on. Tradies cried out in horror when the legendary V8, from the Toyota LandCruiser 200 series and utes, was removed from market in anticipation of the coming government regulations and crackdowns.

Are EVs cheaper to run? Well, a CarExpert road trip test throws real doubt on that. They drove two BMWs on a road trip from Melbourne to Sydney. They were the same exact car, the same year of make, with the same start and the same finish point. The only difference is that one was the battery electric version and the other was hydrocarbon fuelled. When they arrived in Sydney, the electric vehicle charging had cost more for the road trip than filling up with the most expensive 98 petrol. Of course, electricity isn't free, and neither are these chargers. The minister's slush fund that we're seeking to disallow here is paying for the installation of chargers that are businesses in themselves, so we're paying for a business. Taxpayers will foot the bill for installing a charger, and the EV business will reap all the profits from the charge they sell through it forever, for eternity. We would never do this with service stations, because it's bloody ridiculous. Taxpayers should not be paying for the profits of these often foreign multinational companies who run charging services.

Then there's the fire risk. Everyone knows about this. The electric vehicle industry's dirty little secret: the batteries and these chargers present an extreme fire risk. Car ferries carrying thousands of new car deliveries have been left to burn and potentially sink after battery fires have broken out mid-ocean. Just last month, News.com reported:

There are concerns an abandoned EV carrier floating aimlessly in the Pacific Ocean could continue to burn for weeks …

Salvage operators have finally reached the Morning Midas around 350km south of Adak, Alaska, a week after it first caught fire and 22 crew were rescued by the US Coast Guard after being forced to abandon ship.

The floating inferno is said to have been caused by the lithium-iron batteries in the 70 electric vehicles on board—batteries that can cause fires that can burn for weeks.

Some apartment tower complexes have banned battery electric vehicles in their car parks. Our fire departments are sounding the alarm on the increased risk battery fires present. These battery fires often can't be simply put out and must be left for days to burn themselves out. One suggestion to deal with an electric vehicle fire is to have the burning wreck forklifted—imagine the forklift driver!—into a waiting shipping container of water to try and keep it contained. That's a suggestion. Seriously! That's the best firefighting strategy we have when one of these EVs goes up.

Insurance companies have confirmed the risk in electric vehicles is real with their increased premiums. Insurance comparison site Compare the Market conducted a study of 12 insurers and has shown the top five bestselling EVs are 43 per cent more expensive to insure than similar internal combustion models. So EVs are more expensive to buy, more expensive to drive, more expensive to charge and more expensive to insure. We are running out of categories to find out where EVs are actually cheaper.

What about environmentally friendly? Let's ask that question. As for being environmentally friendly, the process for making batteries is one of the most environmentally destructive in the world, killing the environment to save the planet. The hundreds of kilograms of minerals that go into a battery include aluminium, copper, steel, iron, graphite, nickel, lithium, manganese and cobalt. These require extremely intensive mining and refinement and huge, huge amounts of energy. The resources and energy consumed in electric vehicle manufacturing is way above those consumed in making a petrol or diesel engine car. Many of these raw minerals are sourced from conflict-torn places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, using child labourers and slaves. The overall environmental impact of building an EV is devastating, as is the social impact. The raw materials are sourced from ethically questionable countries and processed almost exclusively by Communist China controlled companies. That's where the focus on EVs leaves Australians—completely reliant on China.

Then there's Minister Tony Burke, whose Chinese EV says 'Don't plug in the phone.' Worries about being reliant on China aren't overblown. Government departments are warning Labor politicians of the same thing. The Strategist journal reported in November:

Senate estimates … heard the remarkable revelation that Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has had to take 'precautions' based on warnings from his own department to protect himself and the nation's sensitive information from Burke's own Chinese-made electric car—

He's got to protect himself and the security of the country from his Chinese electric car—

The risks with such cars, according to Home Affairs officials, might include having data collected from the owner's phone if it were connected to the car, voice calls eavesdropped on, image collection from the car's external cameras and geolocation tracking—meaning that if Burke drove to a sensitive government location the car's manufacturer would be able to see.

If these are risks to ministers, those same risks are inherent for all Australians. Bloody ridiculous.

What is even more confusing about the government EV push is that petrol and diesel engines are only getting better and more efficient in their newest versions. Did anyone mention weight? Electric vehicles are humongous in weight. Small, turbocharged, extremely efficient diesel engines were becoming the powertrain of choice, especially in small cars. Fuel efficiency numbers we couldn't have dreamt of 20 years ago were being beaten. Then all the car makers in the world, and many stupid governments around the world, seemingly overnight, had to imagine that petrol vehicles and diesel engines were dead. Imagine that. Everyone would be driving an EV, apparently blind to or not caring for the downsides in range, resources and longevity. Just as we were getting to some of the cleanest, most efficient diesel and petrol vehicles ever made, why did the government decided no-one would ever want to drive them again? They decided for the taxpayers. They decided for the citizens of Australia.

Why does the government want to splash billions of dollars into technology that Australians clearly don't want and that is environmentally reprehensible? The answer may lie in the plan for Australia's energy grid. The government needs electric vehicles hooked up to the grid under their plans for a consumer energy resources like EV batteries to be connected to virtual power plants. They want to use your car as a battery. The government can't afford to build all the batteries needed under their net zero plan. They don't even know how much. There is no plan. So the government wants Australians to buy an EV with a battery that can be taken over and discharged to the grid. They don't tell you that, do they, but that is what they are wanting. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency says that batteries from EVs 'can help stabilise the power grid by supplying power back during times of high demand'. There it is. Do you hear that in their advertisements? No.

Like many things, this will start off as a voluntary scheme, currently called 'bidirectional charging' or 'vehicle to grid'. That sounds good, but think about what it means. It means stealing your electricity when you want it. Then the inevitable threat of blackouts and the instability of the electricity grid under net zero will become an emergency, and everyone with an EV will be forced to participate. What we have now is power shortages in some states as they destroy perfectly good coal and gas generation and try and fail to replace it with solar and wind. So we've got a shortage of reliable electricity. And now they want to convert the car fleet, the transport fleet, to EVs to add more demand to the electricity sector. Then they want to promote artificial intelligence, which is an electricity hog. And then they want to support bitcoin mining. Where is all this going to lead? It's going to lead to massive, sky-high prices as well as shortages, unreliability, instability and insecurity.

The government's plan, or what it claims is a plan, is all very complicated, but they don't know what they're doing. That is fact. One Nation's solution is much simpler: Australians should be allowed to drive whatever car they want, whatever car they can afford, whether it's a four-wheel drive, a ute or a smart car. Only One Nation has a policy to cancel all policies which lead to the death of the V8 engine being provided as an option to Australian car buyers. Porsche and Mercedes-Benz said that EVs would take over, and they stopped making V8s. Now they're bringing back V8s and they're scaling back their EV plans. I ask the Senate to revoke this electric vehicle slush fund and join One Nation in bringing back the V8.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in response to Senator Roberts's disallowance motion pertaining to the Industry Research and Development (Dealership and Repairer Initiative for Vehicle Electrification Nationally (DRIVEN) Program) Instrument 2024. Transport pollution is rising fast, and by 2030 it will be Australia's biggest source of emissions. We need all shoulders to the wheel to drive emissions down, because right now, under current policy settings, we are on track for a catastrophic three degrees of warming. Let's be clear: the government's current set of policies isn't going to bring down transport emissions anytime soon. This $60 million program to install EV chargers at dealerships won't shift the dial on emissions, but it will support uptake at the margins, and that's something.

EVs can and should be part of the solution. They're cheap to run, especially if you have solar panels, and they're easy to drive, but price and charging access remain real barriers to widespread uptake. The global cost of EVs and battery technology is taking care of the upfront costs of EVs. Soon they'll be cheaper than internal combustion vehicles at dealerships, and, of course, filling up on electrons only costs a fraction of the cost of petrol. But removing the other major barrier of range anxiety requires an abundance of charging stations. This, of course, means we need good government policy, and Australia's is not yet up to scratch.

Globally there are 11 electric vehicles for every public charging station, but in Australia there are 68 EVs for every public charger. In that context, this disallowance motion makes zero sense. One Nation's attempt to block modest investment in Australian businesses that is helping dealerships become part of the clean transport transition isn't just petty; it's counterproductive. This program is supporting dealerships to be part of the transition, to use their existing relationships with their communities to encourage EV uptake. On that level, this policy makes sense. No, it won't transform the sector, but it can help normalise EVs, especially in regional areas where local dealers are trusted and embedded in their communities. That's soft power that we shouldn't be ignoring. So, while this won't turn the tide on transport emissions, it shouldn't be blocked or opposed.

But let's be clear: EVs alone won't solve Australia's transport emissions problem. To truly cut emissions, we need serious investment in regular, reliable and well-connected public transport. That's what'll get people out of cars and off short-haul flights. We can't afford more delay. If we're serious about meeting our climate commitments, we need to overhaul our transport system, not just tinker around the edges.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government will not be supporting this motion, funnily enough. The Albanese Labor government is backing Australia's automotive industry to thrive with the auto sector's EV shift. That's why we've launched the $60 million Dealership and Repairer Initiative for Vehicle Electrification Nationally Program, the DRIVEN program. The program provides practical assistance to Australian automotive dealers and repairers to install EV chargers, helping Australian small business to gear up for the EV shift. The first stream under the program gives dealerships and repairers a rebate of $2,500 for eligible smart EV chargers. The next stream of the program will support dealerships to install fast chargers.

The DRIVEN program is part of the Albanese government's Driving the Nation Fund. It complements the launch this year of the new vehicle efficiency standard, which is designed to ensure car companies prioritise Australia for more EV choices for Australian consumers. Australia's dealerships and repairers play a big role in our communities, educating customers about electrification, and they are significant employers and trainers of new energy apprentices—which is the way of the future. It is a practical step to help dealers keep on top of industry electrification trends and the rapidly evolving expectations of OEMs and customers. By investing in EV infrastructure, we're making it easier for them to showcase the benefits of electric mobility, meet the needs of customers and workers, and be ready for selling more EVs as part of the automotive industry transformation.

This program provides practical assistance to Australian automotive dealers and repairers to install electric vehicle chargers, helping Australian small business gear up for the EV shift. To disallow this program while the program is underway would undermine the work that these dealers are already undertaking right now. The coalition opposite need to tell us whether they stand with our dealers, with Australian small business and with the mobility shift of the future, or whether they're going to follow Pauline Hanson's One Nation down the deluded and ideological pathway of taking the country backwards.

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the disallowance motion moved by Senator Roberts be agreed to. A division having been called, I remind honourable senators that, it being after 6.30, we shall deal with it tomorrow.