Liberal senator Bridget McKenzie has again left the door open for a Coalition government to level a road user charge against owners of electric vehicles, indicating concern about decreasing fuel excise and the impact on budgets for road repairs.
But the shadow transport minister also said the Coalition wouldn’t follow the US in banning Chinese-made EVs, which put her at odds with comments on Sunday from Nationals colleague, Barnaby Joyce. He invoked last week’s Hezbollah members’ pager explosions in raising his concern about technology he claimed could be made with a “malevolent purpose” by a “totalitarian state”.
McKenzie told the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday she was developing the Coalition’s transport policy ahead of the next election, which would outline the opposition’s plans for electric vehicles.
Asked if that policy would include a road user charge for electric vehicle owners – a widely suggested option to replace fuel excise due to EVs not requiring petrol – McKenzie didn’t rule it out, but said the current government should already be acting on the issue.
“This is one of the great privileges of holding the Treasury benches. You get to solve wicked problems such as this,” she said.
“The high court has ruled on the need for the treasurer to get going on a national way to actually tax EV users in terms of their use of roads, because right now, it is only petrol excise that is actually funding those roads and they [the government] are again doing nothing.”
The government has come under pressure from motoring groups to address the declining fuel excise take, as EVs take-up rises.
From January to August, 7.6% of total car sales were EVs, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries and the Electric Vehicle Council, while hybrid vehicles sales, including plug-ins, made up 15.5%.
McKenzie has spoken often about the policy challenges of road user charges, in 2023 telling Guardian Australia the government shouldn’t rule out road user charging “when it is tied to fuel excise and fuel efficiency standards – there needs to be one policy discussion rather than a fragmented one”.
In a speech last year, she also said “equity in contributing taxes to fund road maintenance is a key principle” of Coalition thinking on the issue.
The Biden administration last week proposed new rules that would in effect prohibit Chinese-made vehicles from US roads after concerns about software and digital connections that could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage vehicles. The Australian energy minister, Chris Bowen, said Australia would not follow suit.
after newsletter promotion
McKenzie, asked about whether Australia should ban Chinese-made EVs, answered: “It is not the Coalition’s plan. We won’t be banning EVs.”
Those comments put her at odds with Joyce, the shadow veterans affairs minister, who earlier on Sunday had criticised Bowen for not replicating the US move.
Joyce, in a Sky News interview, joked that Bowen had “boldly stated that he knows more about issues pertinent to electric vehicles than the United States of America does”, accusing the minister of “catastrophic decisions” previously.
The former deputy prime minister went on to appear to draw a link between Chinese-made EVs and the pager attack on Hezbollah members which killed dozens in Lebanon last week.
A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations. At least 32 people were killed and thousands wounded, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
“After the pager issue, the pagers basically blowing up around terrorists in southern Lebanon, the penny dropped for so many people that there is a capacity remotely to create massive pain, massive hurt, maybe at the least to create a complete breakdown and chaos,” Joyce said on Sky.
“People have got to start asking the questions like ‘if you can update the software, if you can track these vehicles, if they’re made in China, if there was a malevolent purpose behind it from a totalitarian state, what might be the consequences of that?’”
Joyce also raised concern about “200,000 Chinese-made solar heaters sitting on roofs” nationwide.
In an Sky News interview taped on Saturday, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said Hezbollah “is a terrorist organisation and we understand the security position Israel is in.”
But she stressed the “cycle of violence” and “continued escalation” will not bring peace, citing Australia, the US and the UK’s calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Wong repeated government warnings for Australians in Lebanon to leave “by whatever means are available while Beirut airport is still open.”
“We are concerned about regional escalation,” she said.