Katie - Electric Vehicle Council

Hon Matt Kean MP – EV Summit 2022 Address

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:23:31 +0000

Speaker 1:

So we’re going to go live to the minister for energy, the New South Wales treasurer, Matt Kean, you have the floor.

Matt Kean:

Thank you so much [inaudible 00:00:14] and I’m sorry, I can’t be with you in person, but I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of land on which I’m standing today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Can I thank you so much for the invitation to join your summit and let me acknowledge so many of my peers and colleagues across the political aisle from jurisdictions around the nation, who are continuing to push reform to support the uptake of EVs.

And I want to applaud the innovators and entrepreneurs from the private sector who are so committed and pivotal to the market transformation that we need to see occur. It is your investment in new ideas and new technology that needs to be harnessed, as we seek to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles. There is overwhelming evidence that a tectonic shift is underway among policy makers, car makers, and consumers across the globe. Sales of electric vehicles doubled in 2021 from the previous year, to a new record of 6.6 million and now account for nearly 10% of global car sales. Car makers are retooling their production lines in response to consumer demands and many have set clear targets for phasing out the production of internal combustion engines.

Governments continue to support the push, including tens of billions of dollars in clean fuel and vehicle tax credits, in the Inflation Reduction Act that is poised to pass in the US Congress. As this transformation accelerates, I’m determined to say that New South Wales is positioned as the best place in Australia to buy and drive an electric vehicle. It is absolutely essential to our mission reduction goals. Our economy wide targets are clear, with the goal of achieving net zero by 2050 and a 50% cut in emissions by 2030 against the 2005 baseline.

The transport accounts for 20% of our state submissions, with almost 50% of those coming from passenger vehicles. And without action transport emissions are currently projected to become the leading source of emissions by 2035. So New South Wales understands the importance of decarbonizing transport as we pursue our emissions reductions goals, but we are also determined to seize the mammoth economic opportunities on offer.

New South Wales has a mix of rare minerals, workforce, technological capability and renewable energy sources needed to foster the electric vehicle revolution. The electric vehicle strategy that we released last year, [inaudible 00:02:48] these possibilities by tackling the three biggest barriers to pursuing an EV, upfront cost, model availability and of course, range anxiety.

We aim to drive sales of electric vehicles to more than 50% of new car sales by 2030, and for electric vehicles to be the vast majority of new car sales by 2035. So we committed to rebates of $3,000 on the purchase of electric vehicles sold for under 68,750. And as at the 31st of July, we have issued nearly 2,900 rebates since the initiative began in September last year.

At the same time, we removed stamp duty from EVs valued at less than $78,000, which has helped more than 4,000 customers as at the 31st of July. We’re investing $105 million to accelerate the transformation among fleet operators. Corporate and government fleets account for almost half of new vehicle sales in Australia.

So there are massive strides to be made in that space. And our reverse auction fleets incentive process, to be conducted every six months for the next three years, will help to bridge the cost of transitioning fleets to electric. Our first option produced 20 successful bids and will lead to about 850 new battery electric vehicles hitting the road with 4.5 million in New South Wales government incentives.

Following this success, our second round option is currently underway with a funding allocation of 15 million and a final bidding window closing on October the 24th. We’ve committed to electrifying the New South Wales government’s passenger vehicle fleet by 2030, with an interim target of 50% of fleet procurement to be EVs by 2026. New South Wales is also continuing to expand its investment in the delivery of world class charging infrastructure, that makes range anxiety a thing of the past. It will support the delivery of a charging network that spans high density residential areas, apartment buildings, commuter corridors, along with tourism routes and destinations.

To support this rollout, we’ve now added a further $38 million in the most recent state budget, over and above the $171 million that we had previously committed. Through this additional funding, the new EV ready buildings program will provide $10 million of co-funding to help medium, to large strata buildings, to retrofit their EV charging infrastructure, further supporting New South Wales residents who live in high density areas, where off street are charging and building retrofits are not possible.

We’re also investing a further $10 million to install curbside EV charging infrastructure in those high density areas. 18 million has been allocated to roll out more fast charging stations with more high capacity charges in areas with limited off street parking. And this will be an expedited rollout and between these initiatives, we are ensuring future EV drivers, no matter where they are, we’ll have access to a range of public charging options. We are also determined to unleash new industries with our $250 million renewable manufacturing fund to boost local components manufacturing for EVs.

New South Wales will continue to partner with other jurisdictions on initiatives to increase the number of electric vehicles in Australia and address barriers to their efficient integration into the electricity grid. Our state chairs across jurisdictional EV community of practice, to share updates and progress on electric vehicle policies and programs. We also chair the net zero futures policy forum with Scotland and all late states and territories from Australia are members.

Transport emissions were established as one of the forum’s first three key priority policy areas and were determined to lead the way on reforms to road user charging, and then seek to negotiate interstate arrangements that increased harmonization. New South Wales has announced that we will introduce a road user charge of 2.50 cents per kilometer to ensure that all drivers pay their fair share of road use, but only from July 1, 2027, or when electric vehicle sales make up more than 30% of new car sales.

As someone who is already a proud owner of an EV, I want the benefits of quieter, cheaper, greener cars to be accessible and available to everyone. It’s good for the planet and it’s good for our economy. So I look forward to working with you as we accelerate the transition and to an electric vehicle revolution. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, treasury. We might just keep you online to hopefully take one or two questions. We have our roving mics out the back, and if anyone would like to pop their hand up, we can get it across to you. And there’s one just right here. Also, I’m not sure minister, if you can see us. Yep.

Toby Roxborough :

Hello, Minister. Toby Roxborough from EV Marketplace. We are looking to get a manufacturing support base. And you mentioned your New South Wales manufacturing fund. What can we do in regional New South Wales, say South New South Wales, we’re in the ACT, there’s a region here to support supply chains. We’ve got leading manufacturers like Tridium in this room. We’ve got, how can we get together and support supply chains and the little parts and that make the big parts. So can you suggest anything in terms of what New South Wales government plan is for regional New South Wales and manufacturing?

Matt Kean:

Thanks Tony and thanks for the initiative that you are showing in this space. As I mentioned, we’re determined to unleash new industries here in New South Wales. And that’s why we’ve put real money on the table to support initiatives like yours. It’s $250 million we’re putting on the table for our renewable manufacturing fund to boost local component manufacturing for EVs right here in New South Wales, that’ll be a reverse auction process.

So we would welcome bids from component makers like yourselves to participate in that underwriting where it… That won’t matter whether it’s in the regions or in the cities. We want to make sure that we catalyze the development of new industry when it comes to providing the essential materials for electric vehicles right here in New South Wales, and New South Wales government is backing it in with real money on the table.

Greg McGarvie:

It’s Greg McGarvie representing EMMA, Electric Mobility Manufacturers Australia. We’ve got 20 members all in the manufacturing area, or producing electric vehicle solutions across every sector. And many of us have been in this industry for up to six years. The issue here is supply chain. The other issue of course, is what government is doing to actually support entrepreneurs here in Australia, trying to make things move. Interested in your view on that.

Matt Kean:

Well, Greg, thank you and supply chain is a huge concern to me. We’ve got enormous resources here to take advantage of the move towards a low carbon economy with our renewables, but I want to see us turning our natural resources into new industries, new jobs, and new opportunities. That’s one of the reasons that we’re putting money on the table, real money on the table, $250 million in our renewable manufacturing fund to boost the manufacturer and supply of componentry for not just electric vehicles, but we’ve got other programs to produce the materials that we’re going to need across our whole supply chain to upgrade our electricity system, and to take advantage of the move towards that low carbon future.

So we’ve got a billion dollars on the table here, our net zero industry and innovation fund to help the New South Wales economy to decarbonize whilst creating jobs and growing our economy. So we look forward to working with businesses like yours and many people in the room to develop a manufacturing industry here in New South Wales, around renewables, around clean tech. We see that as a great opportunity for our economy and help in a way that we can help the rest of the world, meet their low carbon ambitions as well.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, minister and treasurer. We’re all delighted that you kept this portfolio despite your many responsibilities. And thank you for joining us here today and a round of applause for the treasurer minister.

Matt Kean:

Thank you everyone. Thanks for having me.

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Welcome to the Electric Vehicle Summit – Behyad Jafari

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:22:51 +0000

I just want to very quickly repeat Wayne’s very big thank you to our partners for holding this event together. Smart Energy Council, Australia Institute, Boundless, but mostly for me, I want to thank all of you from the electric vehicle industry. We’ve been working on these issues over many years, and it’s wonderful to look around today and see just how far we’ve come as an industry. But of course, we’re here to talk about how far we still have left to go. Very precisely about 98% of the market’s worth left in front of us. So quite a lot of great opportunity for us to talk about.

But really importantly, it’s worth us considering why the work that we do here is so important. We know that especially today, Australian families are struggling more than ever before with the rising cost of petrol bills. According to the AAA, petrol bills for families have reached on average, over a hundred dollars for the first time ever. And there’s only really one sustainable and consistent way for us to help reduce families petrol bills. That’s by helping them use less of it in the first place, or in the case of electric vehicles, use none of it at all.

And the good news in that is that we know that Australians are ready. Every year, we work with others and we survey Australian consumers about their vehicle purchasing habits, how they feel about new technology and every year, somewhere over half, around 55 to 60% of them, tell us that they would like their next car, particularly to be electric. Companies purchasing fleets would tell us that they would like their entire fleets to be electric. Those working in bus fleets and truck fleets see the value in reduced operating costs and would similarly like those to be able to turn electric. But for far too many Australians, the opportunity to make that switch is far too limited. The vehicles just aren’t available for them today, and there is work that we can do to help fix that right away.

Quite often when I advise car companies around the country who are looking to introduce a new electric vehicle to the market, I advise them to prepare two statements. The first statement is to say that we’re bringing a new electric car to the market. Great news. The second statement is to say that it’s sold out. It is funny. It’s also a little bit sad. Those two things follow each other far too closely. That’s wonderful news if you’re a local auto executive who sold out all of their stock and met all of their targets or executives who paid my salary, by the way. So I thank you very much for that. But it’s terrible news for Australians and the Australian people.

We have one example and I won’t name exactly which vehicle, but a very popular electric SUV that came to the market in Australia recently. We saw 500 units of that vehicle bought to Australia for Australian customers, and to the car companies’ delight, sold out in just over one hour. It’s no surprise that it sold out so quickly because the company found that they had 16,000 customers lined up waiting to buy that car. 16,000 for 500 vehicles. Buying an electric car in the Australia market today is far too akin to winning the lottery and we need to fix that.

So importantly, we know why that’s happening. The rest of the developed world has introduced for quite some time now very strict fuel efficiency standards or vehicle emission standards that encourage car makers to take their latest and best technologies to their markets first and deprioritize Australia. We’ve calculated the value of these standards in a market like the European Union. Selling an electric vehicle in that market helps a car company avoid penalties to the tune of about $15,000 in Australian dollars. So there’s a very clear economic incentive for car companies to sell their electric vehicles to those markets. Whereas our wonderful local order of executives are run with nothing but their charm to convince their head officers to bring cars here instead, and good on them for doing that work and somewhat setting our market up to 2%, but let’s go and get their backs and let’s make sure that more are available to them.

Of course, we’re in a supply constrained environment, but even within that environment, we see that markets with good policies, incentives, work for charging infrastructure and standards like the United Kingdom, which is another influential right hand drive market, last year saw 305,000 electric vehicles sold to their customers, accounting for almost 20% of their market. In the same year last year, we sold 20,660. Of course to say it’s depressing that I can remember that number so precisely. One day, I’d like not to. Accounting for only 2% of our market. So very clearly the opportunity to make far greater shifts in the immediate term is also available to us as well as the opportunity to fix this issue in 5 and 10 years for the years to come.

The big benefit there for us is ensuring that the vehicles that are already available start coming to Australia and the vehicles that are made available in future years continue to come to our country. We know that the market today already consists of electric vehicles that are cheaper than those available to Australian consumers. So addressing the affordability is an immediate and urgent issue for us, but so is addressing the attractiveness of the market. We also have in markets like the United States, New Zealand across the world, cars like electric utes. There’s no market I can think of better than Australia’s to attract customers to electric vehicles than by offering them utes. But right now, it is a nice to have for global car companies and it’s up to us to turn that into a need to have for our market.

Now in this journey as we develop electric vehicle policies and as we develop standards, of course, you’ll hear quite a lot that Australia is unique. The same is true for every market around the world, every country, and every market has their own unique attributes. But with those unique attributes already today, some 80% of the world’s new car sales market has very stringent fuel efficiency standards in place, standards that are in line with achieving net zero by 2050 and standards that have already encouraged further investment in electric vehicles, in charging infrastructure and other supported investments. We’ve already started to hear voices say that the unique attributes for Australia make us an unimportant and a small market. And as a result, our ambitions in this space should also remain small.

That’s why I’m very happy to be here today opening this summit and welcoming a group of leaders from across business, politics, community groups, trade unions who have come together to say exactly the opposite. We have in this room today people who have built companies or are building companies, developing new ideas to return electric vehicle manufacturing through electric utes to Australia. People who are leading the world in the manufacturer and deployment of charging infrastructure. People who are building Australian businesses and employing Australians enrolling out that charging infrastructure across the country. The opportunity and the ambition and the entrepreneurialism of Australians is fantastic. This today is about coming together on the solutions in order to enable them to do the things to help Australians make the switch to electric vehicles.

Now, in order to start that conversation, I have the very great privilege of welcoming our first keynote speaker for the day. I should say I am additionally privileged because I’m a kid who grew up in Western Sydney, so much like a hipster, I knew Chris Bowen was a great guy before it was cool. But from a more professional perspective, I have to say for our whole industry, it has been an absolute breath of fresh air to be able to deal with a government and a minister that is enthusiastic to engage with forward thinking industries that will listen to their evidence and will challenge them sometimes. As annoying as that may be at the time, it’s wonderful to be challenged sometimes. Deliberate on those issues, all with a view towards actually developing solutions to the benefit of the Australian people.

So everyone, please join me in welcoming our speaker, Minister for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Bowen. Thank you.

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EV FUTURE FOR AUSTRALIA – Hon Chris Bowen MP

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:22:46 +0000

Thank you. I know you join me in celebrating the fact that we meet on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Naru peoples today. And I pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. And thank you, Uncle Wally, for that welcome to the country.

And in acknowledging country, we must also acknowledge two fundamental truths, in my view. Firstly, there is no inequality that climate change doesn’t make worse, including indigenous disadvantage, whether it be people in substandard housing in remote communities or the people of the Torres Strait dealing with the impacts of climate change today on their beautiful islands that I was able to visit recently, and the prime minister was there yesterday.

And secondly, that First Nations people must be integral partners in charting the way forward. And I was pleased that my state and territory energy minister colleagues agreed unanimously last week to the development of a First Nations clear energy strategy. that will be co-designed with our First Nations people.

Also want to acknowledge that men, many members of Parliament here today, many state ministers led by the Chief Minister of the ACT, Andrew Barr. Good to see you, Andrew. Thank you for hosting us today. Andrew and I turn 50 together in a few months time. You’re all invited to a very big joint 50th birthday party that we’re planning. May well be here, but stay tuned. Many members of the federal Parliament from the government and the Cross Bench. It’s good to see you, and welcome to you all today.

Of course, Ambassador Kennedy, welcome. The Biden administration and the Albanese government are very closely aligned in our climate agendas. I’ve enjoyed strong interactions with John Kerry and Secretary Granholm in recent months. And congratulations on the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which could have easily been called the Inflation and Emissions Reduction Act. It’s a very big step forward for the United States and for the world. And my friend Siswo Pramono, the ambassador of Indonesia to Australia. Welcome, [foreign language 00:02:09]. I’m looking forward to joining our G20 energy minister and climate change minister colleagues in Indonesia the week after next. It’s good to see you.

And thank you to the organizers of today’s conference: Electric Vehicle Council, Smart Energy Council, and the Australia Institute for organizing the summit and, more broadly, for your advocacy, which is very valuable as we seek to put electric vehicles on the agenda at every opportunity. And thanks for your advocacy of better policies for electric vehicles against the tide in difficult circumstances in recent years, when the government of the day didn’t welcome sensible discussion. We now have a different dynamic. When we come together to discuss what more we can do together, not against each other, to give Australians access to the best modern transport technology.

Australia now has a government that gets it, but this is just the beginning. It’s not enough. We need collaboration not only across government, but across governments and across society to deal with the challenges and opportunities that are presented by climate change. And on behalf of the new government, I welcome your ideas and engagement and passion on electric vehicles and on so much more.

Now this summit comes at a good time, a time of hope that perhaps after a decade of denial and delay, after an era of demonization of innovation, after years of frustration, that we now have a chance to give Australians access to the world’s best transport technology. Friends, that hope is well founded. There is, of course, a strong case for action. Passenger cars make up almost 10% of Australia’s CO2 emissions, so serious action on climate change does involve serious action on transport emissions.

And as we all know, we’re experiencing significant cost of living challenges, and giving Australians better options, more access to cars which will never oblige them to lift a nozzle at a petrol station ever again, is very good policy, as well. A very good cost of living measure. In 2019, the Australian Electric Vehicle Association estimated that there would be an annual average saving of $500 in fuel and $100 in maintenance cost for every electric car in the national fleet. I reckon those figures may have gone up since 2019. And UBS estimates point to projected consumer savings of $1,700 per annum by 2030 on the total cost of ownership of an electric vehicle versus internal combustion engines.

Now naysayers point to the cost of electric vehicles, that they’re out of reach of ordinary families, as a reason not to drive further uptake. Now, to be fair, to an extent they have a point. There are many consumers who are interested in buying an EV, but even if they could access the limited supply, they can’t afford it. The price sends them to petrol or diesel vehicles against their will. Now what the commentators and the naysayers who bag electric vehicles as unaffordable and unavoidable in Australia miss, and I suspect in most cases deliberately ignore, is that this unaffordability and unavailability is a direct result of government policy. It is a direct result of decisions in Australia, Australian policy failures. If the intent of an electric car policy in Australia has been to limit the availability and choice for Australians, to make them more expensive than they need to be, then that policy has been entirely successful. If the intent was to give Australians genuine freedom of choice and access to some of the world’s best, most affordable cars, then it’s been a failure.

To me, this is ultimately about choice, freedom of choice. And Australian policy settings are denying Australians real choice of good, affordable, no-emissions cars. In fact, when asked, more than one in two people said they would consider buying an electric vehicle as their next car. But the actual number of cars sold, as BJ said, shows that there are serious barriers which need to be addressed. At last count, consumers in the United Kingdom could take their pick of 26 low-emissions vehicles under the equivalent of $60,000. In Australia, that number is eight, and they’re very hard to get. This lack of availability has, I think quite unsurprisingly, led to a lack of sales. Just 2% of cars sold here are electrical plugin hybrid, compared to 15% in the United Kingdom and 17% in Europe as a whole. In fact, Australia’s sales of electric vehicles are at a rate nearly five times lower than the global average.

And as the Electric Vehicle Council stated, the nation report said, “We need to see more electric vehicle models in Australia, particularly at lower price points. To get more models, we need the right policy settings so we could compete with other countries to attract the globally limited electric vehicle supply to Australia.” While we’re behind the pack, Australians are missing out, and without federal leadership, Australians will continue to miss out. In fact without action, to be frank, the situation may well get worse. While other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom are signaling the banning of sales of internal combustion engine cars, we run a real risk of becoming even more of a dumping ground for cars that are expensive to run and at the back of the global pack.

But on the other hand, there’s also a case for optimism. Against the odds, with a very unfriendly federal policy setting, Australians have managed to edge up EV sales to 2% of total sales, off an appalling base of 0.7% in 2019. As I’ve said, Australians are making it clear that they would like to buy an EV if there was more access.

And we know from overseas experience, with the right policy settings, EV penetration can increase quite quickly. Sweden, for example, is an example which struck me, where the proportion of EV sales rose from 18% to 62% in two years. And we know from overseas experience, again, that once you get to 5% of sales, EV penetration can increase very rapidly because a critical mass has been reached. So we have a lot of work to do, but I’m very confident that work won’t be wasted. It will lead to results.

Now, as you know, we went to the election with a clear policy agenda, including for EVs. A driving the nation policy, establishing a truly national EV charging network with charging stations at an average interval of 150 kilometers on our highways, creating a national hydrogen highway refilling network, and to set a low-emissions vehicle target for the Commonwealth fleet of 75% of purchases by 2025. There are thousands of vehicles in the Commonwealth fleet, and it’s big enough to encourage more EV models to come to Australia. And because the Commonwealth turns over its cars once every three years, will expand the second hand market very quickly as well.

Now, we’ve already acted to make EVs cheaper. We passed our fringe benefits tax cut through the House of Representatives. I’m sure it’ll pass the Senate shortly. And we are making the 5% import tariff cut for eligible vehicles, as well. That’s not nothing. It’s material. In particular, the fringe benefits tax changes mean that a model with a sticker price of around $50,000 will be up to $4,700 a year cheaper for someone using a salary sacrifice arrangement. Or an employer paying for a car for their employee could save $9,000. These incentives are critical for fleet buyers, and in turn, secondhand markets, as well as commercial fleets turn over and sell their cars into the secondhand market.

Now we believe we can, and not only can and should, not only have the ability to drive electric vehicles, but also the capacity to produce them. My fellow cabinet minister Ed Husic is extremely passionate about Australian industry, including seizing the opportunities to be involved in the electric vehicle supply chain. Value adding to our abundant supply of critical minerals and rare earths is a key element to our industry policy, which Ed leads. Up to $3 billion of our $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund is available towards activities with a clean energy or renewable component to their manufacturing, and Ed and I fully expect participants in the EV industry to be actively pursuing opportunities for co-investment from that fund.

Our work in battery manufacturing in Australia also provides a complementary platform. Right now, as you all know, we dig up all the minerals necessary for a battery, but we send most of them offshore. It’s a lost opportunity for jobs and investment, and there are an estimated 35,000 jobs and $7 billion in value to be made in Australia from battery technology and industries across all sectors. That’s why Ed and the government will implement a national battery strategy and establish a battery manufacturing precinct in Queensland.

So there has been and will be no shortage of activity from the Albanese government in relation to electric vehicles. But the key to this is linking it together under an overarching strategy, and that’s why we’ve committed to the development of a national electric vehicle strategy. And we’re getting ready to go. Pardon the pun. We’re putting the wheels in motion on developing that strategy. I’m announcing the next steps today.

Today, I can confirm that we’ll be releasing a discussion paper during September to inform the development of the strategy. Now, I know I don’t need to encourage you to put in submission, but encourage you I do nonetheless, because it’s an important process. Yesterday, my friend and colleague, the Minister for Transport Catherine King, and I wrote to our state and territory counterparts confirming the next steps in the development of a national strategy and inviting them to be key partners in that strategy, and inviting them to feed into the policy development process. Many states have implemented their own agenda in the absence of federal policy, so now it’s a chance to work together to get the job done. And just as we’ve partnered very cooperatively with my state and territory energy minister colleagues last week to engineer a faster and more orderly transition, so we want to work in real partnership with the states and territories to deliver a national EV strategy.

The goal of the strategy is clear: to make EVs more affordable, to drive more choice to the market, to drive EV uptake, to reduce emissions, to save us all money on fuel, and to ensure that we’re taking advantage of local manufacturing opportunities. The EV strategy will be our roadmap to get there. And I can announce today that, importantly, the consultation paper will include exploring options for the introduction of fuel efficiency standards. We believe now is the time to have a sensible discussion about whether fuel efficiency standards could help improve the supply of electric vehicles into our market to address the cost of living impacts of inefficient cars and reduce emissions from the transport sector.

Apart from Russia, Australia is the only OECD country not to have or be in the process of developing fuel efficiency standards. The lack of standards in Australia is cited as one of the key factors impacting on the supply of EVs into Australia. Why? Because while Australia doesn’t show leadership, manufacturers will prioritize those markets that do. It’s pretty simple. It means that consumers aren’t getting the choice available internationally, and as the world moves to more efficient and cleaner cars, we risk becoming even more of a dumping ground for older technology which can’t be sold in other markets.

Now, as an example, publicly available analysis published by the Department of Infrastructure under the previous government indicated fuel efficiency standard phased in from 2020 could have already saved motorists up to $1.6 billion in fuel costs. Had that happened, emissions would’ve been reduced by up to 5.1 million tons, and we would now be on track to save much more in the lead up to 2030.

Now this will be a very genuine consultation process and a whole of government process as well. If the government decides to implement and adopt fuel efficiency standards as part of our national EV strategy after this consultation process, the detailed design work will be led by the Department of Transport under the leadership of Catherine King, and I’m very much looking forward to closely working with her as we do that. But from the outset, I do want to say this. While standards must be designed specifically for Australia, standards that lack ambition will leave us at the back of the global queue for longer. Back of the queue for cheaper and cleaner vehicles. We do need to aim for as close to best practice as possible, and I want to make that clear.

But I do think now is the time for the conversation that is open and constructive and mature on how we increase the uptake of electric and low-emissions vehicles. And once we’ve had that open and genuine discussion and consultation, once we’ve worked through the details of implementation carefully, as we do, we should proceed with alacrity to begin the turnaround of the impacts of 10 years of denial and delay in Australia.

So friends, we know the problems: lack of charging infrastructure, range anxiety, high costs, long waiting times, lack of availability. While these are big challenges, there are solutions to each of them. The solutions are different, but they ultimately come back to one thing: policy leadership, leadership the Albanese government will be providing. And just as we have in the broader climate debate, we’ll endeavor to provide that leadership in a way which brings Australians together. All of us on this journey, not division, not the politics of identity, but bringing Australians together on the important journey. Our Driving the Nation policy to have a fast charger every 150 kilometers, for example, is designed to ensure that Australians in rural and regional areas don’t miss out on the capacity to consider an electric vehicle for their next purchase.

While some in the past have chosen the politics of demonization and division, a better approach is collaboration and consultation. Electric vehicles cannot, and under us will not, be the preserve of well-off people in urban areas. They must be available for all. We want policy settings that make them available, affordable, and attractive to every Australian. We know we can provide Australians with that choice while preserving their ability to enjoy a good weekend away, while preserving their ability of choice, and preserving their ability to get the cars they want to reduce emissions. Friends, we’ve got a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do together. I very much look forward to joining you on the journey as we do that work. Thank you.

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GLOBAL EV MARKET: MIKE CANNON-BROOKES (Atlassian) ROBYN DENHOLM (Tesla) EYTAN LENKO (Boundless)

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:22:34 +0000

Speaker 1:

I’ll just very quickly introduce Boundless because we are a relatively new organization. Boundless’s mission is to ensure that Australia’s on track to becoming a renewable energy superpower by 2030. We, like all of you in the room, want to contribute to an Australia that we can all be proud of. To us, that means a prosperous, renewable energy superpower and a global force towards a decarbonized world. We’re here today because dealing with transport is a big part in bringing that vision to a reality. Transport accounts for 18% of Australia’s emissions and the majority of those emissions are already addressable with mature technology, such as electric vehicles combined with a shift to active transport.

As we know, Australia lags the rest of the world in EV uptake. The good news is that the policy measures that can encourage EV adoption are well understood and the really good news is that Australia, completely dependent on imported oil and with access to cheap, renewable electricity, has more to gain than most. We helped put together today’s summit to put those policy measures and the benefits of a fast transition to EVs in the spotlight, especially with a new government that’s just signed up to more ambitious emissions reduction targets. We won’t hit those targets without dealing with transport emissions. So Boundless is proud to support our partners, the EV Council, the Smart Energy Council, the Australia Institute, and we appreciate FEMA coming on board and sponsoring the event as well today.

Now, I’m super excited in particular for this session and honored to be able to moderate it. I’m going to invite two people to the stage that require no introduction and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say, but just in case you’ve been living under a rock, we’ve got Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla, the company that’s done more than any other to lead the EV revolution, and Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-CEO of Atlassian and, more importantly, the chair of Boundless.

Is this working? Yeah. So to kick off, it’d be great to get your reactions to the minister’s speech today.

Robyn Denholm:

Why don’t I start? Yeah. So thank you, Minister Bowen. I really appreciate not only you taking the time to be here, but also how many people are in the room here today. It is actually a pleasure to hear the government actually putting forward what will be, I think, quite an important step for Australia in reducing emissions over time. So the goals in which Minister Bowen talked about in terms of affordable EVs, actually reducing costs for average Australians, working through consultation with industry, I think is key for Australia to move forward in EV adoption overall. So from my perspective, great progress. Bring on September so that we can all have the submissions and hopefully a resolution for a national approach with state, local government and industry participating. I think it’s a great step forward.

Speaker 1:

Great. Mike, what did you think?

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

Look, I think the good things to take out of the … well, Chris has just announced that maturity with which the government seems to be approaching the problem is a really refreshing step, I suppose. We have to have clearly fuel efficiency standards. We’ll hear a lot of that today. So the fact that they’re on the agenda is excellent. The fact that as someone, Robyn, who builds cars that have great speed, the fact that we have a date in September for consultation and we hope that that process moves fairly expeditiously. Because as BJ talked about, the speed with which we get this adoption comes to how fast these standards get implemented. So we hope there’s expeditious speed in there. I think most importantly, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about it is the fact that our standards cannot be a step forward from where we are today.

They have to catch up to where the rest of the world is. The problem is right now, we are far behind the rest of the world. Whatever we get to can’t be then continue to be far behind the rest of the world. We have to make that leap to catch up to where they are. I believe I heard that in the remarks today, so that’s probably the thing I would take out and highlight as a real light that we need to hold onto because that’s what we need to get to is to be on par with the rest of the world.

Speaker 1:

It was great to hear Minister Bowen talk about the point that a market hits a tipping point of EV adoption and take up accelerates from there. Boundless has been looking at 2024 as a target for that tipping point for Australia to hit 10% of new car sales being EVs. Mike, why don’t you start this time? What do you think it’ll take for Australia to get there by 2024?

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

To get to 10% by 2024 from two and change? Look, firstly, we have to have the belief that it’s possible. We can see that. We didn’t talk about our friends across the ditch in New Zealand who’ve gone from 3% to 10% in a bit over a year. So we know that that leap is entirely possible. When we like to talk about, “Oh, well, it’s totally different in Sweden because they’ve got this different world and it’s very different,” I’ll give you a hint, it’s no different over the ditch. They actually use all of our vehicle standards in terms of seat belts and regulations and most of the road standards are exactly the same and they have far less to gain than we do as a country. So we should take great optimism from that.

The one thing they do have is very sensible fuel efficiency standards and general EV policies that we could implement relatively quickly, which I think would be the major gap closer for us to get from that two and change percent towards 10. Again, 10 is a really big tipping point, as been seen globally, as you’ve mentioned, around the world. I think that’s obviously what we need and the question is how fast we can get that implemented.

Speaker 1:

I mean, Robyn, Tesla’s brung in the majority of the 2% that we are already getting. Is Tesla scaled up to get us to the 10% and what do you think it’ll take?

Robyn Denholm:

Yeah, I mean, I think very much in terms of what it will take is education. So forums like this in terms of educating the vast population out there about EVs, because quite honestly, there’s been a lot of fud in the past in terms of what EVs can do and can’t do in terms of your weekend activity. But from my perspective, that’s the number one thing. The second thing is a charging infrastructure because range anxiety is real, even though latest models can get up to 500Ks in terms of range, but people don’t know that unless you’re driving an EV. Then to me, the other thing is the incentive around the efficiency standards and the fuel standards. To me, that’s a really important part of this because whilst there aren’t models across all of the categories of transportation today, there will be. So the sooner we can get those standards out there, the better the industry will be prepared to actually have a roadmap to get to all of the different categories of transportation in Australia.

So for me, that’s a really important ingredient for the long term. The way I think about it in terms of an analogy is that where we’re behind the pack. It’s like that high school student in Year 12 who knows that they’ve got exams in October and we are in March and they haven’t actually opened the books yet. So the reality is we’ve got to start swatting. We’ve got to set that roadmap up. We could give up and say, “We’re never going to get there,” but the reality is we can and we should. Having those ambitious targets to actually contribute to the 2030 real reductions that the government’s put out, to me, transportation is part of the low hanging fruit of getting there and we’ve done it before. I am old, so I was around me in the vehicle space. When we went from leaded to unleaded petrol. You put out the marker, you say where you’re going as an industry and everybody lines up to get there. So from my perspective, I think they’re the ingredients that we need.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

I think one of the things I might add is we’ve seen from all the comments today, again, I used the word maturity, as someone who’s driven an electric vehicle, a few of Robyn’s wonderful cars, for nine years now, I haven’t missed a weekend and I actually live in rural original Australia. So we can kind of dispense with a lot of that fight, as we said. The second thing to point out is that the demand is real. We see that in the room here, we’ve had to not let people in and we see that in all the queuing and the waiting and the frustrations. BJ talked about it’s winning the lottery to get an electric vehicle. We should be ashamed by that. That shouldn’t be the case.

The narrative that, “Oh, people don’t want these,” or, “It’s going to change,” I think we can hopefully put that completely behind us and realize that demand is not the problem at all. The problem is entirely about supply. So we should just focus on the supply problem. We are well progressed in terms of charging infrastructure, and I think we’ll continue to improve there, but really it’s about a supply problem and that that’s the fundamental sort of brick we need to remove so that we can get through.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So let’s get into the detail a little bit. We’ve heard that fuel efficiency standards are a big part of the solution of unlocking supply to Australia. We’ve heard Minister Bowen say they’re going to open up for submissions. Tesla will be writing submissions. I’m sure most of us will be writing submissions, but what does a good fuel efficiency standard look like?

Robyn Denholm:

I’ll start and you can … So to me, we’ve got to catch up to the rest of the world quickly, as quickly as humanly possible. So having a standard that doesn’t get us close to meeting the European or U.S. standards I think doesn’t cut it. So having that ambition of having a global leading standard or at least in keeping with the global leaders I think is really, really important. I do think 2030 is an important date that we’ve got to have a date by which we’re reducing materially the emissions from our vehicle fleet. It isn’t just about EVs. It’s also about reducing the pollution and the emissions from petrol vehicles.

Because as I said, there’s not a range of vehicles that covers all of the requirements of a market, but they will get there over time. But to me, what we can’t accept is the world’s dirtiest cars in Australia and that’s what we have today and that’s increasing. Again, having seen this movie before, if we actually are out there talking about what the standards are for petrol vehicles, as well as for total emissions, it’s really important that we put that out there so that we can clean up our act before we get to a fully electric world.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:I think I would add … look, again, we talk about 2030 a lot. Just as a reminder, that seems like a long time away. It’s 100 months next month. So you can start your clocks from 100 months and start counting down. That’s not a lot of months. So expeditiously doing this is probably one of the more important factors. As Robyn said, it just has to be on par with the rest of the world. So we are lucky in a little bit of a way, let’s take some optimism, that there are many examples of this in the rest of the world, both of the standards and the numbers, but also how they’ve been implemented and the effects of that. That lets us watch and see what’s worked best and presumably take best practice. We shouldn’t be ashamed of copying from what’s best in the rest of the world.

One of the parts of what has worked well is these cannot be voluntary standards.

Robyn Denholm:

No, that’s right.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

There must be compulsory standards and they must have teeth. We currently have a voluntary standards regime. I joke about it. It’s like marking your own homework. It’s actually not, because no one has to mark the homework. You don’t even need to submit the homework, the standards we have have no penalties, no regulations and not even any reporting. So it’s not even marking your own homework. It’s literally just that nobody bothers to even have a look at the homework and you don’t even need to do it. So they have to have some sort of teeth in them to get that balance. Again, there’s lots of great examples of that around the world. That will send a very clear message to the industries, not just vehicles, but all sorts of other electrical transportation about where we’re headed and then that’s what brings the signal in for those companies faster.

Speaker 1:

Okay. You mentioned it’s not that long to 2030. It’s also not that long to 2050 and considering that every new car on the road stays on the road for 10 to 15 years, if we start to think about the climate trajectory and the emissions trajectory, I mean, what does it mean for the Australian transport market if we’re serious about hitting our Paris Climate Agreements in Australia?

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

Well, look, congratulations to Minister Bowen and the new government, 43% is a better target than we had before. I think we’re clear it’s not enough as what we’re going to have to get to, but as that target is 43% and will presumably go up between now and 2030, we have a lot of work to do. Again, transportation is a significant part of Australia’s emissions, about 18%, about two thirds of that are passenger vehicles. That is one of the easiest sectors for us to actually attack and make a meaningful difference in. Because we have electric vehicle technology where this is not some future magical thing we need to invent. I drive on every single day and have done for nine years and there’s plenty of them out there and they’re getting cheaper and it has lots of contingent advantages. We’ve talked about consumers bills going on and everything else.

So if you’re looking at how Australia’s going to get there, this has to be one of the major sectors that we go after very, very fast, firstly. Secondly, I think if you look back at the stats, it’s one of the sectors that’s actually gone up over the last few years. So the problem we have is since 2005, I think it’s 5%, 7% rise in transportation emissions.Speaker 1:

12%.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

12%? Sorry. 12% rise. [inaudible 00:14:25] a numbers man. So people don’t realize that sometimes, that our emissions from transportation are actually rising. So the first thing we have to do is stop them from going up and then start them going down. So we should be clear that this is a sector with a huge amount of opportunity to contribute to that 43% and beyond reduction. But also that it is currently a sector that’s taking us away from that. It’s going in the reverse direction.

Robyn Denholm:

Yeah, I totally agree. The other thing I will add, being a part of the technology sector for a long time now, over 30 years, great technology always has two paths. You always have the early adopters, but you also have the economic equation and there’s a crossing point where the new technology actually is much more affordable than the old technology and you actually end up in a wholesale shift into that new technology. That is what’s happening with EVs today. So my view is the economic equation is better than it was eight years ago when I joined the board or nine years ago, when we started driving EVs, it’s better than it was even five years ago. Because the cost of oil has gone up, the cost of the technology for EVs is coming down. Hopefully it will continue to come down. There are lots of battery innovations that are happening.

We as Australians can actually contribute to that. As we talk about the supply chain in terms of how we reduce the cost of EVs globally through battery technology and battery minerals. But to me, that economic tipping point is actually already behind us. So I think that’s a very important part of the equation and I was very pleased to hear Minister Bowen talk through the economics as well, because every day Australians are struggling with what’s happening at the petrol pump each and every day.

Speaker 1:

Actually, I love when you hear countries that put on a 50% target for EV adoption, because if you understand S-curve adoption of technologies, you never really get to 50%. It’s kind of like the example Minister Bowen gave about Sweden. You go from 20% to 60% to 80%. 50% is actually a very unstable point that you just kind of generally blast through. So given that we’re on that economic trajectory, we’re trying to encourage take up. Australia, hopefully we’re going to move faster and we’ll get to that tipping point. What are the opportunities for the wider economy in Australia to benefit? It’s a huge change. The opportunity for Australia goes beyond that we’re just going to be driving cars that are cheaper to run. What do you think some of the bigger benefits are?

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

Well, I leave the mineral side and everything for Robyn who’ll comment for me adeptly on that. We’ve talked a lot about the individual consumer and reducing their costs. Again, your petrol bill on average for an Australian household is twice your electricity bill. So if you think how many column inches have been spilled, and I’ve spent a bit of time in that space, on your electricity bill, it’s a lot. The amount that’s been spent on your petrol bill and how much you spend on that is far less, right? That’s before we get to things like maintenance costs and other things. So yes, we have to get the cheap supply in, but once we get the cheaper supply of vehicles, we understand that will reduce everybody’s household spending.

From a sort of national economy point of view, we are a massive net oil importer. We don’t have any natural resources in oil, particularly that help us with this equation, and that will completely change. The less oil we import, it’s better for our balance of trade in all sorts of ways. We do have, as has been mentioned, a huge ability to generate our own electricity as a country, both nationally in terms of industrial scale and the grid scale, but also individually. We have the highest amount of household solar adoption. One of the things you see with electric vehicles is your propensity to install solar panels goes up I think three or four fold once you get an electric vehicle.

Because you suddenly realize, “Wait, I can make my own petrol and it’s very cheap to get it off my roof and stick it straight into my car?” The economics of your panels get much cheaper as does the economics of your electric vehicle. So we’re actually well poised to do that from a sort of household economics on a daily point of view and that’s a really big point. We’ve talked about emissions, so maybe I’ll leave it to you to talk about minerals and other things which I know your passionate about.

Robyn Denholm:

Yeah. I was going to say Mike knows that I get quite excited about this topic. So I actually think that electric vehicles’ battery technology is the biggest and best economic opportunity for Australia in a century. I mean that, because if you look at the bill of materials in terms of what goes into batteries, Australia has them all. There aren’t many other countries in the world that actually do, and we have a core competency in the first area, which is in mining. So whether it’s lithium or copper or manganese or any of the different elements that go into a battery, we know how to do that. But last year, Tesla bought a billion dollars worth of minerals. 70% of those came from Australia in terms of lithium. But what happens is we dug the rocks out of the ground, the spodumene main rocks, and we sent them offshore to be refined.

So no value add. So that billion dollars, a fraction of that comes back to Australia because of the way we’ve gone about the supply chain. What we need to do is to get the resolve to actually go up the food chain in terms of the electric vehicle and battery [inaudible 00:20:02], because it’s the same batteries that firm renewable energy, as do power electric vehicles. We’re very, very early in that whole cycle, but that supply chain will start to be locked in for the next decade and for the decades after that pretty soon. So I was very pleased as well to hear about the government policy to actually look at battery technology as being an industry that we want to invest in as a country.

It is not just up to government. It needs to be public private partnerships because we have the knowhow, we have the technology, we just need the will to actually move forward. We also have the capital. It is a very real opportunity for Australia to actually participate in that and become an energy superpower.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

We talk at Boundless a lot about using our time, talent and treasure towards making Australia renewable energy superpower and this is a perfect example. When you say that, people assume that’s all about putting up solar panels and it is a piece of the puzzle. Turning Australia to renewable energy superpower, which is, I agree with Robyn, the largest economic opportunity we’ve ever faced as a country, is about exporting our cheap energy. We should have the cheapest energy in the world and we’re going to export it. Now we can talk about how we’re going to do that via a wire. We can talk about how we’re going to do that as hydrogen or some sort of material, but the category we leave out the most is by basically higher valued exported goods that come from a very cheap cost of materials, that come from a cheap cost of energy and that come from using our national time, talent and treasure to go at that problem. Again, we have a huge amount of financial resources in Australia, we have huge amount of talent in those industries and so we should think about that as exporting our bounteous resources, our boundless resources, pun intended, of those renewable energy assets that we have and the resources assets we have as higher valued manufactured goods. Batteries is one fantastic and huge category example of where we could be doing that, but we should see that as a portion of being a renewable energy superpower as a country.

Robyn Denholm:

Totally. I think batteries are the stepping stone for both renewable energies in the firming of those technologies, but also in EVs. There is no reason why we can’t produce EVs in Australia. There is no reason. I came out of the car industry in Australia. I was with Toyota when we actually used to make vehicles in Australia. We’ve got the talent. With automation and advanced manufacturing, we can actually produce economically efficient vehicles here as well. So to me, it’s just the will and the tenacity to actually work through what needs to be done.

Speaker 1:

I might just also call out, we’ve got Ambassador Kennedy with us today and obviously the U.S. President Biden just signed the Inflation Reduction Act and it has significant tax benefits and subsidies for EVs. A lot of those subsidies are tied to the origin of the materials in those EVs to either be from America or from countries that America signed a free trade agreement with, such as Australia. So I don’t think that’s fully percolated through, business and government understanding [inaudible 00:23:29] in Australia what a massive opportunity that is to kickstart the processing industry in Australia, because America is going to be only subsidizing vehicles where the materials come from countries like Australia and not countries like China, which is where most of those materials come from today.

So back up that case of a massive opportunity for Australia. So I mean, Australia, we do think of ourselves as different. We often say we can’t do things like fuel efficiency standards in Australia because we drive utes and we drive long distances. The best selling car in Australia is the Hilux. I mean, how much of the shift is cultural versus political versus economic? Can we do it as a country?

Robyn Denholm:

Of course we can. So you just have to travel all around the world. I mean, I spend a lot of time in the U.S. I’ve lived in the U.S. The cars in the U.S. are big. So from my perspective, if the U.S. can actually adopt fuel standards that are much better than ours in terms of 20% to 30%, then we can do that. I mean, no one is trying to take the tradie’s ute away from them. I have a family of trades people. But what we need to do is have utes that can actually be more efficient and we can do that today from a petrol perspective, and then over time as those models come out from different manufacturers around the world, and hopefully even here in Australia, then you can actually replace those with electric vehicles. Again, if I go back to the economics of it, driving a ute today is a very expensive proposition in Australia. So having the ability to take technology and actually apply it to that economic equation is really important.

Speaker 1:

What do you think, Mike?

Mike Cannon-Brookes: Look, absolutely no reason we can’t do it. I think it’s why we’re all here. Look, your Hilux example is a really interesting one. Obviously we have, as a broader group, the Japanese auto manufacturers are the least ambitious, let’s just say, for these standards to move. So we hope that that part of the equation moves forward. I think as we can see in the U.S. from the cyber truck to Rivian to the Ford F-150 Lightnings, there’s no shortage of electric utes and pickup trucks coming out. I forget the stats off top of my head, but the Ford F-150 Lighting, I think completely blew away at sales targets. So you think, “Oh, well, this is a category of people who they’re not really sure about your vehicles.” One comes long and it’s like, again, the demand supplier equation is out. So I don’t think from a demand perspective in terms of that it’s going to make a difference.

I think there’s also an undersold benefit in how much it can change those jobs. Right now I probably have particular types of tradies and tend to encourage the use of electrical tools, let’s just say, on the farm. But if you’ve got a ute that’s electrically based, one should not forget that you are taking around a power center with you. So in terms of charging, whether it’s a whipper snipper, whatever piece of equipment that you are putting into your ute, you have the ability to power it from the ute. So you can then recharge a battery bank that goes into a drill or whatever it is that you’re taking with you. So we should forget that this can actually be not just advantageous in terms of their bills, but advantageous in terms of their efficiency of doing the job. So I think I’ve yet to find anyone that’s against the equation. I think the demand and suppliers is exactly the same problem in that category.

Speaker 1:

Imagine a world where there’s no more petrol powered leaf blowers or whipper snippers, and it’s all just quiet electric powered from the utes. I think that’s a vision we can all sign up for.

Mike Cannon-Brookes:

See me with my electric chainsaw on the farm, mate. It’s quite [inaudible 00:27:05].

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you so much for your time today. Obviously you’re two leaders in the industry, thanks for all the work that you do at Tesla and thanks for Mike for backing Boundless and for your advocacy for causes like electric vehicles in Australia, and thanks to everyone today for attending. It’s a real show of strength, I think, that the government and media get the message this is a really serious industry and that we’re ambitious and that we want to see change in Australia. So thank you all for coming and thank you both for joining us.

The post GLOBAL EV MARKET: MIKE CANNON-BROOKES (Atlassian) ROBYN DENHOLM (Tesla) EYTAN LENKO (Boundless) first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

Hon Michael Wood, New Zealand Minister for Transport – EV Summit 2022

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:22:20 +0000

Richie Merzian:

Good morning everyone. My name is Richie Merzian. I’m the Climate and Energy Program Director at The Australia Institute, one of the three organizers… four organizers, sorry, for this particular summit today. So it’s a pleasure to be here with you. Next up we have, I think, a really nice speaker that follows on from the fireside chat we had. Mike Cannon-Brookes said that we shouldn’t be ashamed to learn from the lessons overseas, especially since we’re playing catch up, and no better lesson than the one from across the ditch where New Zealand has managed to go from three to 10% new car sales electric in just a bit over a year.

So we’re fortunate enough to have the minister, the honorable Michael Ward, minister for transport from New Zealand, joining us live from Wellington. We’re going to have him up on the screen to give his opening comments, and then hopefully have a few questions if technology allows.

Michael Wood:

Well, thank you. Kia ora koutou katoa, and a very, very good morning to everyone who’s gathered here at this Australian National EV summit. I’m very pleased to be able to speak with you a little bit about Aotearoa, New Zealand’s work and journey towards our goal being one of the most attractive markets for electric vehicles in the world. And if I can just start off with some good news to give you some hope, because we came from a pretty slow standing start just over a year ago. In fact, over recent months, we are getting closer to 20% of new sales across our fleet being zero emissions vehicles, and up to around about 45% across zero and low emissions vehicles. What that goes to show is that decisive actions, policy, and collaboration between government and industry can lead to a fast transition in this sector. And that’s what I’m keen to speak about today.

Can I also acknowledge Chris Bowen and Catherine King. I met with Catherine when I was in Australia last month, who have indicated today that they’re looking at consultation on an EV strategy and a fuel efficiency standard for Australia as well. So great to see our partners and the Australian government also really beginning to make progress in this area as well.

For New Zealand, we are keenly aware of the fact that climate change is one of the biggest threats that we face as a country. As we speak, the top of the South Island is currently coping with record floods through one of our cities, Nelson, and we continue to experience extreme weather events across all parts of the country. And so it’s abundantly clear to us that the climate crisis is not a future threat, it is a current reality, and that reminds us of the need for urgent action.

In New Zealand, our CO2 emissions come around about 40% from our transport sector, and transport as a whole is the second largest emitter after agriculture. So in short, if we don’t take action on transport, then we will not hit net zero, we will not hit our 2035 targets, and we will fail future generations. So we are seized of the fact that transport needs to affect a real transformation in the coming years to become far less carbon dependent.

In New Zealand, we have whakatauki, which are words of wisdom in Te Reo Maori that really sums up the work that I think we need to do in this area. [foreign language 00:03:27] which means wishing for the crayfish won’t bring it. You have to get on to the action point, and that’s what we’re doing in climate.

One of the other things that I’m very conscious of as we look to decarbonize the transport sector, is that we have to tell a whole story. And the story that I like to tell is that if we do this job well, we’ll make most other things better as well. We’ll have cleaner air, we’ll have less congested and pleasanter cities and towns to live in, we’ll improve road safety, and make many other improvements to the way that people live their lives. As an example, we’ve recently had a major study release called the HAPINZ 3.0 report, which is the Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand Study, which shows that currently transport related air pollution in New Zealand is resulting in the premature deaths of more than 2,200 adult New Zealanders a year, more than 9,200 hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiac illnesses, and over 13,200 cases of childhood asthma. There’s no particular reason to imagine that proportionately, you wouldn’t be suffering the same effects in Australia.

So the transport choices that we make have a direct daily impact, not only on our emissions, but on the health of people in our communities, our friends, our families, and ourselves as well. So all of this reinforces a need for us to be taking action to clean up our fleet, and to make sure that we are reducing emissions.

We’ve got work underway at the moment to move towards the adoption of Euro 6 across our fleet as well, and we have consultation with our automobile sector at the moment around what the pace and phasing of that change might be, and we look forward to working with Australia on that particular issue as well.

Our broader emissions reduction plan is a structured one. Our parliament declared a climate emergency back in 2018, which was a statement of intent. Following on from that, we created a Zero Carbon Act, which formally declares our commitment to net zero by 2050, and also establishes an independent climate commission to provide politically neutral scientific advice about the emissions budgets that we need to set sector by sector in order to be able to achieve those targets of net zero by 2050 and a 41% reduction by 2035. The government is then statutorily obliged to respond to that advice from the commission and to produce an emissions reduction plan. We produced the first such plan in May of this year, and chapter by chapter, it tells New Zealanders the objectives that we have and the policies that we will follow to meet those objectives.

The transport chapter is one of the most significant. It sets us on track to achieve a 41% reduction by 2035 across transport through four key targets. The first is increasing zero emissions vehicles to 30% of the light vehicle fleet by 2035. We need to reduce our emissions from freight transport by 35% by the same time, we need to reduce total vehicle kilometers traveled by the light fleet by 20%, and we need to reduce the emissions intensity of transport fuel by 10%. So you get the flavor across all of that, that we don’t think we can achieve those targets just by one lever. It’s got to be by all of the levers that we have available. We need more people to get onto public transport and walk and cycle instead of getting in their cars. But when they do, we need those cars to be as clean as possible, as quickly as possible.

The targets I’ve just gone through are ambitious, but our modeling shows that already with the steps that we have in place, we’re on track for our first five-year carbon budget and transport to be achieved, which will pretty much be the first time ever that we’ve turned around emissions coming out of the transport sector.

Over the course of the last year and a half, we’ve gone from extremely unfavorable policy settings in this area to very positive policy settings that are making a real difference. To encourage supply, we’ve now set a CO2 emission standard on vehicle imports into New Zealand, which suppliers must meet. The requirements strengthen globally. Starting from next year. By 2027, these will be amongst the strongest CO2 targets set globally. So we’ve gone effectively, along with Australia and Russia, from being almost alone in the OECD and having no emissions targets to having some of the strongest targets by 2027. And we believe that that will make a real difference.

We already hear from vehicle importers that it is making it easier for them to access supply from overseas suppliers because they can see that there’s a regulatory environment, which incentivizes it. Effectively for importers of vehicles, they face a fee over the course of the year based on the average emissions of their fleet. So there’s a direct incentive for them to begin lowering the emissions of their fleet by getting an increased supply of clean or cleaner vehicles into the system.

Then on the demand side, we’ve established a feebate scheme called the Clean Car Discount. Gives people up to 8,625 New Zealand dollars for purchasing a zero emissions or low emissions vehicle. The whole rebate scheme is financially sustainable as it’s paid for by charges of up to 5,175 New Zealand dollars on the highest emitting vehicles. So the Crown has effectively loaned a sum of just over $300 million to our transport agency, and they will run that scheme in a fiscally neutral way over the next 10 years or so, and the money will be paid back at the end. And what it also means is there’s an incentive at both ends, an incentive for the cleanest vehicles and a disincentive for the dirtiest vehicles in the system.

The rebates and charges work on a sliding scale based on the emissions profile of the vehicle, and it’s working better than we expected. We first introduced the rebates on the 1st of July this year, and then the full scheme came into effect on the 1st of April this year with a wider range of rebates and the introduction of fees as well. We are now seeing months in New Zealand where the top selling passenger car of any fuel type produces no emissions.

As of December of last year, which was six months after the rebates began, the new passenger vehicle segment is already on track for our 2023 CO2 target, a year ahead of schedule. We managed to achieve a 15% reduction in the average emissions of the new fleet coming into New Zealand within about three months of the scheme coming into effect. It previously took eight years to have a similar reduction. And as I said at the beginning, our sales by market share of EV passenger vehicles have risen by about 3% in 2020 to around about 20% currently as well, and we expect that to increase further based on the demand that we’re seeing.

So what it shows effectively, and I listen to the little clip that the honorable Chris Bowen and the honorable Catherine King had up on Twitter before, there’s a bit of a focus on choice here. We’ve shown that when we provide reasonable choice to consumers through a little bit of a nudge on price and a bit of encouragement on the supply side, consumers will flock to electric and low and zero emission vehicles for all of the reasons that we know.

To better inform consumers, we’ve also introduced mandatory vehicle emissions and energy economy labels on new and used vehicles, so that they’ve got that choice there and got the knowledge. We’ve also invested $15 million annually in co-funding for innovative vehicles and EV charging stations alongside the private sector. Over 97% of our state highway network now has a fast charger every 75 kilometers, and 85% of Kiwis are able to charge their EVs at home.

More recently in the budget this year, we’ve introduced the Clean Car Upgrade, which is a scrap and replace scheme for low income households to get EVs and hybrids, and it’ll start with a trial from April of next year. It’s broadly based on the California scrap and replace model, which has been effective in supporting lower and middle income households to get the benefit of EVs and cleaner vehicles.

Finally, all newly bought public buses from 2025 in New Zealand will be mandated to be zero emissions, and the entire fleet will have had to have transitioned via mandate by 2035. We already now have hundreds of electric buses in service and on order, and we’re making progress there much more quickly than was initially intended. So across the sector, our policies are working and helping to ensure that we will not become a dumping ground for the world’s dirtiest vehicles, which is a real risk for any country, which doesn’t move ahead in this area.

As I said before, our goals to decarbonize transport are ambitious, and they need to be if we want to get to our targets. To achieve our goal, almost all vehicles sold in New Zealand will need to be zero emissions for several years before 2035. Based on the projected fleet size, we need to import about 1.5 million zero emissions vehicles by then. We do know that vehicle supply, particularly for right-hand drive markets is challenging. So we’re going to need to work very closely with industry in order to be able to meet those targets and give our consumers the clean vehicles that they want.

And this is where I think there is a great opportunity for Australia and New Zealand to work together. With the strong alignment that we’re seeing between our governments now, in terms of intent, direction and vision, if we can find ways of working together to unlock supply for our two markets, that will benefit the transition in both countries. So the right national policies, but also regional and global cooperation are important. And during COP26, New Zealand joined many countries and declarations to be part of the international effort to work towards sales of all new cars and vans being zero emission from the middle of the next decade, and for medium and heavy duty trucks to become zero emission globally by 2040.

So New Zealand’s journey has started off well. There’s still a long way to go, but our government is determined about this, determined to work with the sector, and determined to ensure that clean vehicles are a critical part of our transition to a decarbonized transport sector in reaching net zero, which we all need to do. And I look forward to working with yourselves and our colleagues and the Australian government in the years to come. [foreign language 00:14:12]. And I wish you a very successful and productive summit.

Richie Merzian:

Thank you, Minister. We might just keep you for one question. The example in New Zealand gives us hope, and not just on CO2 emission standards, which otherwise known as fuel efficiency standards, which the minister just announced a process to kickoff here, but you’ve been leading on, but also on electric buses. It’s great to hear by 2035, the entire fleet will be clean, but also on the feebate scheme, which I think is something quite courageous. And in Australia, we often do it the other way around. We often tax the things we want more of and incentivize the things we want less of, but with the feebate scheme, you’ve managed to get it the right way around.

Are there any questions for the minister? We have two roving mics at the back. We have time for maybe just one question for Minister Wood if there are any right now. Otherwise I might lead with… Just gentlemen over here.

Speaker 3:

Minister, thank you very much. To what extent are used EVs part of the transition that’s happening in New Zealand, importing used EVs? And are the import rules free of restrictions?

Michael Wood:

Yes. Used vehicles are part of both the clean car standard and the clean car discount scheme. In the case of the discount scheme, the feebate scheme, both the charges and the discounts are set at a lower level than they are for new vehicles, and that’s in reference to the fact that on average, we would expect that a new vehicle will spend less time on the road in New Zealand, therefore the benefits and the disbenefits are less, but they are included within the scheme. And in fact, that’s been a very successful part of the scheme. The biggest selling vehicles receiving a discount under the clean car discount have in fact been on the used side. And the ambit of the scheme, it is set based on emissions profile, not necessarily fuel type. So obviously it captures electric vehicles, but it does also capture the different varieties of hybrid at this point. As time goes on, we expect the standard to rise and it to move closer to just capturing EVs. But at this stage, both new and used and also a variety of zero and lower emissions vehicles.

We do think that’s important by the way, because one of the sort political sticky points I think in setting up these schemes is ensuring that it isn’t in fact, and isn’t seen to be a scheme which just subsidizes vehicles for the wealthiest people in one society. So ensuring that there is access to vehicles at a lower price point I think is quite an important part of the transition and an important part of the social license. So the other detail here is we set a price cap of $80,000 for the clean car discount. So vehicles have to be priced below that to access the discounts. That had a dual benefit. Firstly, it has ensured that point I’ve just raised, but secondly, it’s sort of had a double effect. It’s meant that a range of importers and distributors have made pricing decisions in the first instance to bring vehicles down below the cap to access the benefits of the scheme, and then the discount comes on that. So with some of our number of hybrid electric vans on the market, we’ve effectively seen about a $20,000 reduction in the price as a result of that effect.

Richie Merzian:

Thank you. Could I please have one more round of applause for the minister, Michael Wood.

The post Hon Michael Wood, New Zealand Minister for Transport – EV Summit 2022 first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

Rt Hon Alok Sharma MP – EV Summit 2022 address

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:22:10 +0000

Speaker 1:

We’re fortunate enough now to have the COP President, the UNFCCC Conference of the party’s 26th president, the honorable Alok Sharma, join us from London, to provide us with his insights on how we can electrify our transport here. You can play that.

Speaker 2:

Ministers, colleagues, friends. Thank you for the invitation to your National Electric Vehicle Summit. Today, is another example of Australia’s renewed commitment to climate action. And whilst I’m joining you virtually today, it was a real pleasure to see so many colleagues in government and business, when I was in Australia last month. It was a fantastic visit. I went to Stirling Park, a nature reserve in Canberra, to see the important work being done, to preserve native trees, to tackle climate change, and biodiversity loss. It was an honor to spend time with the Ngunnawal indigenous elders, who shared their experience of the disproportionate impact of climate change on their communities. And I also heard from both, first responders, and business leaders, who told me that flooding in some areas, which used to be one in a 100 year events, are now happening every 10 years or even every five years.

Bush fires, heat waves, droughts, and tropical storms, are becoming much more common, too. And communities, businesses, and governments, across Australia are left having to deal with the costs. As we know, climate change does not recognize borders, and across the world, including in Europe, we are regularly now experiencing the impact of global warming as well. So as we all agreed in the Glasgow Climate Pact at COP26 last November, governments have to act and they have to act, now. And that is why I also met with ministers to discuss your governments plans, to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030. That is a good start. And we spoke about the big push on renewables and climate finance. And I particularly enjoyed being chauffeured, briefly, by Minister Chris Bowen, in his Tesla, no less, to talk about the potential of zero emission vehicles… the reason why we are all here today.

Road transport currently accounts for 16% of Australia’s emissions and 10% around the world. And as I heard from the Mothers for Clean Air group, who I spoke with in Glasgow, and who I have met this year as well, fossil fuel transport continues to poison the air, particularly affecting children around the world… all the while global car ownership is expected to double in the next 20 years. So if we are to keep 1.5 degrees within reach, and build a cleaner and safer future, we must end new sales of polluting vehicles. And I’m pleased that we are seeing progress. In the UK, for example, we will end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030. By 2035, all new cars and vans will be zero emissions at the tailpipe. And we are backing those commitments with strong standards and the required investment in charging infrastructure, too. COP26 was an important milestone. We launched the Glasgow Breakthrough on road transport, which I was delighted to see Australia endorse.

And through this agreement, the international community is working together to make zero emission vehicles, the new normal, accessible and affordable in all regions by 2030. And we also launched a zero emissions vehicle declaration, to accelerate the transition to 100% zero emission cars and vans by 2035 in leading markets and 2040 globally. And I want to recognize, and thank, each Australian state and territory, which has signed up to that declaration… The Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria. You have joined over 180 signatories, including nearly 100 national and subnational governments, committed to ending the sale of polluting vehicles, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and cleaning up the air that we all breathe. And so I urge more states, more territories, more businesses, and fleet owners in Australia, to come forward and match this ambition… because the direction of travel globally is clear. We are driving to a net zero future.

And for instance, nearly 20% of the global market is now covered by zero emission vehicle targets, aligned with the Paris temperature goals. So we are driving there in our electric cars. Of course, the work we must do stretches beyond electric vehicles and road transport. So whilst I do want to see the national government committing to all new sales of cars and vans being zero emissions by 2035, it is time to go further. At COP26, our mantra was, “Cash, coal, cars, and trees”, to keep the world to 1.5 degrees. And now, is the time for Australia to turbocharge progress in all of those areas, from reducing your reliance on coal, to investing in renewable energy, and developing grid capacity and energy storage facilities. And know that whilst you do, this is not just about tackling climate change. It is also about creating jobs. It’s about delivering growth and even becoming a green export superpower in green steel, hydrogen and critical minerals. I understand the think tank Beyond Zero Emissions, Australia, estimates that by 2050, green exports could be a $333 billion per annum opportunity.

So friends, thank you again for stepping up and demonstrating ambition and commitment to lead. And I hope today’s discussion further enhances, what I say, electrifies the scale and pace of your work, as we look ahead to COP27, because together we can deliver the clean future we so desperately need… delivering prosperity without sacrificing the planet. Thank you. And good luck with the rest of the summit.

The post Rt Hon Alok Sharma MP – EV Summit 2022 address first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

Fuel Efficiency Standard Panel – EV Summit 2022

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:21:50 +0000

Speaker 1:

Please join me in welcoming our speakers, Paul Sansom from Volkswagen, Sam Johnson from Polestar, Rob Giltinan from the NRMA, and Zoe Daniel, the member. Please do. [inaudible 00:00:32], Zoe, for a moment there I forgot the name of your electorate, the member for Goldstein. Had to look that up. As a New South Welshman, have no need to know, unfortunately.

Thank you all for joining us. So I’m not going to do a long introduction of everyone. Instead, I’m going to ask you to make some introductory remarks of your own, and in a selfish attempt to try to shape some of those remarks. We’ve, of course, been speaking quite a lot about the need for fuel efficiency standards in Australia. Not only to finally have them in place, but also to ensure that we have strong ones that resemble the rest of the world in order to provide certain benefits to Australia. So, can I start you all off by… Please do introduce yourself, make some introductory remarks, but also tell us as leaders, both in politics and industry, and also representing motorists, of course, why that is such an important subject to you. Paul?

Speaker 2:

You’re starting with me. [inaudible 00:01:20]. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the introduction. So Paul Sansom, I’m the group managing director for Volkswagen in Australia. And Volkswagen’s made up of passenger cars and commercial vehicles, but also of Audi, Škoda, and recently we launched in Australia, Cupra, which is our Spanish brand, made from Barcelona. So I’ve got five unique European brands that I’m representing, and this conversation has been one that we’ve been consistently talking to for many years now, actually. So culminating in this morning’s announcement from the minister, obviously we’re delighted to hear that the minister is starting a process of consultation with the industry to introduce some fuel efficiency standards.

It was really interesting, from my point of view, to listen to Mike Cannon-Brookes saying that there’s not a demand issue, there’s a supply issue. It was closely followed by the minister saying, “The supply issue is caused entirely by lack of policy leadership,” so that you can see what’s happening and this is why it’s so important. I’m sitting here representing probably 180 dealers around the country and with thousands of customers. And one in two of those customers are walking into our showrooms every day, asking for an electric vehicle. And we can’t satisfy that demand because we haven’t had leadership in policy.

So these targets that we’re talking about are incredibly important because the conversations I have with five different headquarters across Europe, they say, “Well, what’s the situation in Australia, Paul. And is there some legislation that we’ve got to adhere to? Is there some potential penalties that we need to be aware of, that are financial?” And I say, “No, there isn’t.” And they say, “Okay,” and move on to the next market. And those other markets are getting all the supply. And that’s why our consumers here in Australia have been getting shortchanged with the latest and safest technology that’s the lowest carbon emissions. So these targets are incredibly important. So I’m very encouraged by announcements this morning, Bay.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. And Sam, Polestar, of course, only sells electric vehicles. So I think maybe a misapprehension out there is that this doesn’t matter to a company like Polestar, that this is easy, you just bring all of the cars that you have. Can you reflect on that?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. I mean, the decision makers, when they’re sending EVs to a country, need to make sure that, that country has the right policies that supports EVs. Otherwise, it won’t have the appropriate demand and consumer uptake. So, for me in Australia, being even in EV company in its own, I have to still convince our decision makers to bring supply to Australia rather than other right hand drive markets like the UK. We’ve got such strong demand and supply policies in place. So I have to convince them. Australia has got a huge potential for EVs and the momentum is really there now, but we have to put all the things in place. But we do have very good policy support and future policy plans being put in place, that I can now go back to my decision makers and say, “Hey, we’ve got a good environment here in Australia. Give me the supply that we need, to satisfy the demand.”

Speaker 1:

Wonderful. And Zoe, of course, you’re in your unique position as a representative in our parliament. We’ve heard you speak about this issue and related issues, quite a lot. Why don’t you start us off with why, why is this such an issue for you?

Speaker 4:

Because it’s an issue for my community. I was voted in on a climate platform, and I come from a community in Melbourne that is a highly educated and socioeconomically, largely wealthy community, and does have comparatively high uptake of EVs. But there’s still frustration in my community around lack of supply, around lack of charging infrastructure. And I do think that there is a sense within the community of a two tiered system around electric vehicles, where a lot of people can’t access them because of cost. People who are renting, don’t have access to charges in the environments in which they live. So it is something that came up during the campaign, but I think it’s part of a broader changing attitude in this country where people began to feel, and I think the election result reflected it, that their government wasn’t acting on the will of the community on these kinds of things. And that was reflected in the vote.

I would say that I’m pleased to see the minister launch the discussion paper intent. I know that I popped down to the press conference while everyone else was still in here, old habits die hard. And the first question he was asked was, “Is this a carbon tax?” Which takes us back to the old days of the end of the weekend and all sorts of other culture war tactics that have been used around this issue. And I agree with what Robyn Denholm said, that in part, this is educational, but it’s also to do with bringing all of the community along and giving all of the community access to, not only electric vehicles, but all sorts of environmental technologies that take us forward as a country.

Speaker 1:

I’d quickly like to say, unfortunately, Emma Harrington has had urgent family medical emergency. So thank you to Rob for agreeing to jump in last moment, and for putting you on the spot. But speaking about bringing the community along as, if I’m not mistaken, the largest membership organization in the country, representing motorists, particularly in New South Wales, but doing operating across the country. Your organization has been very vocal underneath four strong standards. But what does that reflect in terms of where you see the communities on this issue?

Speaker 5:

Yeah. So thanks, Bay. And I had a couple of hours this morning at least, to put into Google what an EV was. So I’m well prepared for today. I joined the organization back in 2017, and at that point, the board and the executive made a pretty strong commitment that we were going to concentrate on what we could do to support a future, because we knew, based on the conversations with manufacturers that, that was ultimately where we needed to be. We have 2.8 plus million members now, and we have the advantage of being able to go and test policy positions quite regularly, test purchase propensity and those sorts of things. And back in 2017, when we went and asked them about electric vehicles, and you might remember we did a code paper at that point, we received a lot of pushback from the membership. It was incredibly negative.

And whilst we always like to support the membership and put their views forward to Australian governments, we also sometimes need to take a leadership position. And that’s what we decided to do when we announced $10 million to invest in a charging network in New South Wales and to concentrate on having that regional, because we knew that ultimately that wasn’t going to be a focused area of commercial operators who were putting charging infrastructure at the time. So we made the decision to concentrate on the policy angle and the infrastructure angle. And we’ve done a lot of work over the past five years in doing that, particularly with the New South Wales government on their recent reforms, and also the ACT government, two of the leading jurisdictions in the country in terms of support for EV.

What we have seen now, and the important point, I guess, to make is that over five years, we’ve seen sentiment shift really significantly. And the most recent data that we’ve got is just this week, which shows that now nearly 60% of the membership are showing a desire to purchase an electric vehicle as they’re next, and that more than a quarter have actually actively gone and researched about purchasing a next vehicle. So it’s moved dramatically in that short timeframe, and we’re not seeing any of the negativity come back from the membership now like we did just five years ago. And one of the things that we are doing with the New South Wales government, is running electric vehicle drive days, which we saw as a really important tool to get people behind the wheel and to give them an understanding of what it’s like to own and operate an EV. And we’ve only just started that program, which we’re hopefully going to expand into the ACT as well, and run it for the next 18 months at least.

But what we see from sentiment shift, when people are unfamiliar with the vehicle but then have an experience, is that shifts further again, and all of the kind of anxiety and the range anxiety and those types of issues disappear pretty quickly. And we see a lot of enthusiasm built up around EV, which is great. So we’re doing a lot on that side, but where we’re probably lacking in terms of leadership at a policy level is at the federal level. New South Wales and ACT, as I said, have done great things, really, really great things. But recently we’ve seen the federal government take a leadership position, and start to shift. Look at FBT, look at the import tariff. We feel that a CO2 standard is the obvious missing link that can help supply, moving forward.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, if I can come back to you for a moment. So we heard this moment that, I guess, the starting gun has been fired, the firing gun has been started. And there will be a process from hereon now. What job do you think there is for the parliament and for parliamentarians, particularly on the cross bench, to do throughout this process?

Speaker 4:

Well, I have to be blunt, and I think on this, it’s exert pressure for fast and timely action. I think everyone in this room knows what needs to happen. I think the minister knows what needs to happen. And I think a lot of people in the community know what needs to happen. So I understand from a perspective of de-risking what has been a hot political potato for a long time, that the government wants to do a process of consultation and a discussion paper. So let’s make it a quick chat. I would like to see the results of that discussion if, let’s say, it’s a month long process of submissions that we might see by the end of the year, what that’s yielded. And then there’s the actual writing of the regulations, and that will take time. But of course, in the volatile political environment that we’re in, we want this through in this parliament at worst, and preferably sooner than that. So I think that’s where I’m at with it, pushing for that. And that’s not from me necessarily, that’s from my community that I know wants this.

Speaker 1:

It is a pause worthy [inaudible 00:11:52] this year. Absolutely agree. Sam… Samantha, sorry. You’re in a position, you’ve launched the car, an electric car in the market this year. You’ve seen firsthand what that appetite and the consumer attitude to electric vehicles is. Are there any insights there that you can share [inaudible 00:12:08], both how it’s gone, launching a vehicle in the market, how that’s performing, but also what have you heard back?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think for Polestar, I mean, we have a moonshot goal of a net zero emissions vehicle by 2030. So this is really strong to our beliefs in bringing electric mobility to Australia. We’re seeing a real shift in consumer behavior. People are talking about EVs being their next car now rather than their second car or something they’ll do in the future. So sentiment is really changing for us. As a EV brand coming to the market first time, two years ago, we looked at what the modeling was like and the infrastructure, and said, “Well, it’s really in its infancy, but we can just feel the momentum is going to be there.” When we go to today, there has been a huge shift in that demand. But we need to bring all the things into place, all the things we’ve been talking about today, to have the infrastructure for consumers to be able to feel comfortable in buying an EV. But the fuel efficiency standards in being able to have the supply of EVs is the strongest thing that’s needed at the moment.

But on the incentive side and the consumer side, the demand side, we still do need to have a federally or a national consistent model around incentives, and at a threshold that really understands that costs have gone up. So the input costs have gone up. The prices of cars have gone up, and not just EVs, petrol cars as well. But the thresholds haven’t changed incentives for EVs. So really, they need to reflect that higher cost, to be able to bring more people into their EV space, rather than people at the higher end saying, “Okay, well, I’m just going to buy a petrol car. It’s easier. It’s cheaper.” So, that needs to happen. And being consistent across Australia as well, where there’s different incentive amounts or thresholds. There’s different amounts. Some have different stamp duty incentives, registration incentives, road user taxes. It’s just very varied and so is the administration for businesses.

So something we’ve really tackled with as a business coming to Australia, is all the different ways that you have to provide EVs and these incentives to consumers. And education as well. And I think you spoke about that as well. That is a key thing because there’s a lot of consumers out there that don’t know that there are incentives and benefits available. We assume that they do, but they don’t. So it’s a lot more. So yes, we do need to really open up that supply to Australia, to satisfy the demand that is there now. But there is so much more demand, that we need to really catch up with the rest of the world. So Zoe, I agree, things do have to happen more quickly. We have to accelerate to be able to catch up because we are way behind, and we can’t go at the same pace the other countries have gone. We have to do it faster.

Speaker 1:

Now, Paul, one of the criticisms we hear about fuel efficiency standards is that, even if we set very strong ones, even in line with the rest of the world, over the next decade, decade and a half, we just can’t get cheaper electric vehicles or things like electric utes that Australians love. You run the Australian arm of the… What is it? Second largest volume manufacturer of vehicles in the world. Why can’t we have cheaper electric cars on electric utes?

Speaker 2:

Well, we can, frankly. So just to give you some numbers, the Volkswagen group, by the end of this decade, 50% of the cars that we produce and sell worldwide, will be battery electric vehicles, by the end of the following decade. So the end of 2040, a 100% of the cars that we sell across 14 brands or so, will be battery electric vehicles. The plants and the factories that they’re produced in, will have net zero emissions. The transformation is profound in our company. And the more that transformation gathers pace, the more choice there is. And there’s already choice from our group today that’s on sale, that are much more affordable, by the way, EVs than they are on sale here in Australia today.

In Europe and in other markets, and the reason I come back to that, I think the starting gun has been fired today, which is great. But it is only a start, is that these fuel efficiency standards that we hope are implemented. And Chris Bowen said, “If we implement…” And I wish he had said when. And there is a need for consultation. I agree it needs to be fast. Because we’ve been talking about it for so long. And we need to get it into the market now, because it will unlock some production that comes certainly from our company and many others in the market to give the consumers greater choice for more affordable EVs.

But that is just the start. And I would go on to say the targets aren’t, that’s not the panacea. There’s a huge amount of work we’ve got to do as an industry to not only get greater supply and product and choice and make it more affordable, there does need to be incentives work in Australia. But they work in EVs in the rest of the world, they need to work here as well. Some that have been announced, like the FPT, stamp duty and the instant asset write-off, luxury car tax can go on electric vehicles, for instance, and the rest. But incentives with home charging and incentives for industry to set up infrastructure around the country.

And I do agree with, Sam, your point around harmonization. What’s emerging very quickly, is a patchwork across the states. That’s very difficult for us as manufacturers to then advertise anything nationally, because you’ve got a different price in one state you have in the next. That’s no good for the consumer. It’s confusing. It’s confusing for the dealers. We have to harmonize that. So I call for a federal policy on this. And I hope what Chris was saying earlier on, is that he can start working with the states to bring some harmony to the incentives, which are much needed. It’s come up, time and again, there’s an education piece. So I said one in two customers are now talking about buying an EV. So they’re fairly well educated. They still need more. But the other half, there’s a long way to go with that education. And there’s a lot of myth busting to be done around EVs that we can do, and we have a responsibility as manufacturers, as well as many other parties.

So look, I think we should be ambitious if the ute comes up often. At the moment, they’re probably a lot of those. Some manufacturers are already building electric utes. Whether they’re destined for Australia, I can’t tell you that. Our company has got a big proportion of volume in North America where the ute is also popular. This is another popular market here. There are other ute markets. I’ve got absolutely no doubt that somewhere sitting in a confidential office in Wolfsburg in Germany, someone’s designing an electric ute. It will be made available, left and right hand drive. There will be electric utes in our market. If we set ambitious goals, it’ll accelerate that pace of change.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful. I’m about to open up for audience questions. So if you have them, be ready. But one more question for me, just because I’m very selfish. We’ve been talking a lot about speeding up the consultation process. So Rob, I’m going to throw it to you. Consultation to the federal government on fuel efficiency standards, where do they look like go?

Speaker 5:

So just, I guess, to give some context, if you look at the state commitments to net zero 2050, I think there needs to be a plan put in place across every sector to enable us to achieve that. We, given that we’re an advocate for the consumer, feel that the biggest difference we can make is in the transport sector and particularly in light vehicles. For a CO2 target, if you have a look at the rest of the world, we’re a long way behind. The Triple A did some modeling around this. I think it was back in 2016 or 17. And there’s a general consensus now that, that is effectively redundant. It needs to be sharpened significantly.

But we need to have ambition because if you don’t have ambition, you’re not sending a market signal to manufacturers and to jurisdictions overseas. And so, if you have a look at what’s going on around the world, have a look at what the international energy agency saying, have a look at the member feedback that we’ve got, we feel that we should have the ambition to look at 2035. And to say, at that point, we have to have the overwhelming majority of sales to be zero emissions, if not all sales to be zero emissions. There’s definitely a phasing process to go through to achieve that. But we need to do it now because we need to catch up, is the overriding message.

Speaker 1:

I’ll open up to audience questions and I’ll let everyone do closing remarks and let the rest of you answer this. But I think we have people with microphones. So if you get a microphone, you get a question, I think, is the system. Wayne’s coming around with one now.

Speaker 6:

Yes. My question is not about the consultation period, but about the notice period. When a minister called Paul Fletcher was in charge of this policy in 2017, before he went silent, he was talking about an eight year notice period. In other words, the mandatory efficiency standards would not be introduced until 2025. What are the views of the panel and what is a reasonable notice period for consultation with the industry?

Speaker 2:

Maybe I can answer that and say that the industry has actually been calling for these standards for some time. And we’ve got the most… Well, I would call it bizarre or unique situation in Australia, where the industry set its own standards. Now you heard Mike talk about those earlier on, their voluntary standards. It’s a relative low bar. We know we can do better. But the industry’s been waiting for this. I’m representing Volkswagen here today, but I can tell you there could be any other CEO of an automotive company sat here will be saying the same thing. We’ve been calling for these standards because our customers are queuing up in our showrooms. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the viral videos that have been going around social media. The queues outside electric vehicle showrooms at the moment are phenomenal. Some of the new brands that have been launching, there’s a huge interest in this.

So the message really is that, back then or even when these standards were introduced in Europe or the UK where I’m from, back in sort of 2005, we were having that discussion, there was a transition. Back then, there wasn’t an electric vehicle. There wasn’t much choice. A lot had to be worked out. We’ve heard a lot earlier on, that the blueprints were already there for us to follow in Australia. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. We can just take the very best of what we see in other countries, that we’ve seen from some of the speakers already this morning. The most important thing is the products are there. The products are there, they’re on sale and they’re being used by customers all around the world. We can bring them here if we get the circumstances right. So we don’t need as much notice period as perhaps we thought, when we were talking about it back in 2017. The world’s moved on. And by 2030, we’ll have moved on again at a dramatic pace. The pace of change that we feel today, it’ll never be this slow again.

Speaker 4:

Can I just… I totally agree with what Paul said. And I think there’s no case for eight years when the manufacturers have known this was coming and the products exist. I’m curious how long you think you do need. Is two years long enough?

Speaker 2:

The consultation process you’re talking?

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

No, I think that’s too long.

Speaker 4:

No, but implementation.

Speaker 2:

Implementation. If we had some standards today, we could start bringing some cars tomorrow. We really could. But I don’t want to overemphasize that. In fact that’s a game changer. It really is. Not just for Volkswagen, for all automotive companies. It’ll open up the doors to more affordable EVs in our market. I’ve got no doubt about that.

Speaker 5:

And just further, I think the notice period, as long as you’ve got a mandate in place and you have a phase set of targets looking at a particular end date, it’s probably less important. But, given the fact that we’ve got sulfur levels reducing to 10 parts per million at the end of 2024, 2025 probably makes reasonable sense, which is a pretty short timeframe, from my view.

Speaker 1:

Have a question on this side of the room?

Speaker 7:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

If you could please introduce yourself when you ask the question.

Speaker 7:

Scott White from the Delegation of the European Union. Thanks for such a great event today. Paul, this is another one for you please. I was just wondering, we have been hearing about supply chain issues in many manufacturing sectors. I’m just wondering how much that is a factor in your being able to meet demand. Of course, not just in Australia, I’m talking globally here. In terms of manufacturing, how many issues you are seeing around supply chain constraints, that kind of thing, at the moment?

And a second question, just out of curiosity actually. I was wondering, one of the things that perhaps might account for the popularity of utes or pickups in Australia, might be towing capacity. So I’m just wondering if perhaps anyone on the panel could shed some light in terms of how EVs or larger EVs go with towing, and whether that can perhaps help [inaudible 00:25:09] some of the potential concerns on the part of Australian consumers. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

[inaudible 00:25:13] interrupting us that we start with maybe Samantha on the supply chain question, if that’s okay.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. No, that’s fine. I think, globally, I mean, obviously China’s been shut down with COVID for a while for us, and there’s been other areas of semiconductor issues and everything. We’re only now having the factories all starting to ramp up again and start to get that production going. So, supply is definitely an issue now globally and having to fight for. Like in our company, every country has to fight for why they deserve to get that supply and what they’re going to do. And they must not be stock sitting on the ground. It must go out the door. So I think, globally, everyone has to fight for the supply at the moment. As supply ramps up globally, again, they’re going to send the EVs to the countries that have fuel efficiency standards in place.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, Paul, to interrupt you.

Speaker 2:

No, that’s fine. Yeah. And actually probably that’s a great question. Thank you for it because… Or two questions, cheeky. But I think it’s great. To damper my enthusiasm around, if we had the standards today, would bring the customer. There is a global supply chain issue on combustion engines and electric vehicles that we are all grappling with, particularly our company at the moment. But we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, we’ve had a real compound effect. We had obviously the pandemic, and the impact that, that had on the supply chain. We’re still feeling the ripple effect of that in certainly in logistics. We then had the outbreak of war in Europe that had another very detrimental effect on the suppliers, quite a lot of component suppliers in South Ukraine, which are doing an amazing job by the way. They’ve reopened, which I think is just testing me to the resilience of that nation under this horrific situation they found themselves in.

And then we had another shutdown in Shanghai, where, for our group, we’ve got 19 component suppliers there. So the compound effect of that has had a dramatic impact on the supply chain that we’ll still feel for the remainder of this year and into next. But we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, whether it’s combustion engine or a battery electric vehicle. Battery electric vehicles do have probably two to three times more semiconductors in them than a combustion engine vehicle. So there’s more delay, but again, that’s another supply issue. But let’s just say, the world was… Please, goodness, there is going to be a moment when the world all calms down a little bit and some of these major impacts start to slow down there. But let’s say, all things are even and supply wasn’t a problem. The only reason then it would have left as an issue in Australia for getting supply of electric vehicles is lack of policy, which comes back to what we’ve talked about this morning.

To answer your question on towing, no difference. That electric vehicles can tow just the same as a combustion engine type vehicle.

Speaker 1:

Now we are just about out of time, but I’ve got to annoy the organizers a little bit and give one speaker the opportunity to give closing remarks. Apologies to the rest of you, but it’s going to be the speaker who added the most color to our panel, Ms. Daniels.

Speaker 4:

Thank you. Well, look, I’ll just close by saying, what’s happened today with the announcement that the ministers made in regard to the discussion and what this piece might look like, is just a piece, and it’s just a start of a process in a particular area of a much larger dynamic that’s going on. So I think we need to see it that way. And at the moment, I’m kind of with a notebook going, “Okay, that piece, that piece, that piece. What’s the next piece?” And I think that the next piece, if we are talking about finally creating some policy certainty in these areas, is to say, “There will be no new car sales of fossil fuel vehicles in Australia after 2035.” Japan’s done it. Vast areas of Europe have done it. The industry needs certainty, consumers need certainty. And I think that is the next step. And even surveys of Australians show that 65% of people support that. The political will finally is there. And I say, spend the political capital while you’ve got it.

Speaker 1:

I gave you collecting remarks. Please join me in. Thank you.

The post Fuel Efficiency Standard Panel – EV Summit 2022 first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

Hon Tom Koutsantonis MP – EV Summit 2022 address

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:20:03 +0000

Speaker 1:

And now we’ll be going to South Australia to hear from the honorable Tom Koutsantonis, the minister for infrastructure and transport, who’ll provide us with insights on what’s happening in South Australia, following their election.

Minister, you have the floor.

Tom Koutsantonis:

Oh, thank you very much for the introduction, and thank you very much for having me. I was intrigued by the earlier speakers about national consistency, and I couldn’t agree more, which is what drove the Malinauskas Labor government in South Australia to take a policy to the election of not supporting an electric vehicle tax on a state based regime.

I am very concerned, as was your panel, about the patchwork of policies around electric vehicles across the entire nation. We are burdening our constituents with a patchwork of policy that will mean that our constituents will be paying more, and get, I think, poorer quality outcomes from the transition to electric vehicles. We need consistent national policy, and that’s what we’re arguing for. There should be one framework about the import of electric vehicles. There should be one policy about a tax and regime for electric vehicles, and it shouldn’t be done on a state basis.

On a state basis, we will get competition from the states. We will get different types of outcomes. We see that now with car registration. We can’t afford to have that when it comes to importing electric vehicles. So we took to the election, a policy of decarbonization, electrification and incentivizing electric vehicles in South Australia, and we’re committed to continuing to do that. So we’ll be abolishing the EV tax here in South Australia. We are committed to the rollout of electric vehicles. We’re rolling out charging stations across South Australia with a relatively large and significant budget to try and incentivize charging.

We are working with our electricity producers to make sure that smart charging can be incorporated with the purchase of new vehicles. And I would say to manufacturers, they have a responsibility here as well at the point of sale. And I am getting very concerned about the infrastructure at the point of sale for ChargeNet is being delivered to electric vehicle owners. Basically to dumb it down, they’re being given emergency charging equipment rather than smart charging equipment to install at their homes or to use. And I think there needs to be a legislative or regulatory framework about what comes with an electric vehicle.

We’ve also brought in our own incentives, and those incentives are on a cash basis. There are a $3,000 subsidy for the purchase of a new electric vehicle here in South Australia as well as registration subsidies and stamp duty subsidies. But that’s not going to be enough. Electric vehicles need to be affordable. And I think there’s been a misinterpretation across the nation about what our constituents are looking for. There is a theme or a vibe going around the country that working class families or working families don’t want electric vehicles. It’s just simply not true.

You ask any working family in my electorate or electorates all across Australia who are struggling with fuel prices. They want to see the transition happen faster. And they’re being advocated by people who don’t understand their concerns and needs. They want this transition and they want it quickly. They want to be able to buy affordable electric vehicles that serve their needs. They want to understand how it can work and they want to make sure that there is a consistent framework across the country and they don’t want to wait. So it’s up to us, the policy makers to do what we can.

And I put this in terms of the other transitions. The former Weatherill Labor government, which I was energy minister and energy minister now in this current government, set about a transition that was mocked nationally. We were mocked when we built the big battery. We were mocked when we attempted to decarbonize our electricity network. We were mocked when we closed our last coal-fired power station. But these are now the laws. And the services that batteries provide to the grid are transforming the grid and lowering prices, the same thing can be done now with electric vehicles. They offer more services than just decarbonizing travel. They offer amenity.

And I just point out as transport minister, when we decarbonize and electrify our passenger transport fleet, I ask you, what the amenity changes will be in our central business districts, where noise reduction from public transport that sees electric vehicles without the reverberation of diesel engines across CBDs that are magnified because of the buildings, the amenity improvements to living in the CBD and the density improvements we get from that amenity improvement. There are lots of benefits, that let alone what electric vehicle charging can do to stabilize the grid. What it can do to of course, offer FCAS services as frequency control ancillary services that can offer when people aren’t connected to the grid, when we have smart charging.

There is a whole concept around electric vehicles that is being ignored by a lot of policy makers. But I think for the first time in a decade, we have a policy partner in Chris Bowen and the rest of the states, that acknowledge that this transition is coming and coming fast. And our constituents are ahead of us. Quite frankly, they’re moving faster than the policy makers. And it’s now up to us to make the regulations and the policy framework to move that transition as quickly as we possibly can. And we’re committed to it.

So thank you for the opportunity to speak to you briefly. I’m happy to take any questions if you want. I’m in your hands.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, minister. Unfortunately, we’re a bit tight for time today. So we might just say that from mocking to applauding, we appreciate the quick moves from your government to repeal the road user charge for electric vehicles and to bring in a variety of policies to lead the way. So thank you, minister.

The post Hon Tom Koutsantonis MP – EV Summit 2022 address first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

What We Need From Federal Government Part 1 – EV Summit

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:19:53 +0000

Richie:

Keeping to the theme of the leadership from states and territories, I’d like to invite my colleague Audrey Quicke, the Transport Lead at the Australia Institute, to the stage for the next two panels on government action at the national and subnational level.

Audrey Quicke:

Thank you, Richie. So welcome to our next panel discussion on what we need from the federal government. It is my pleasure to invite to the stage Andrew Barr, Chief Minister of the ACT, and Mark Bailey, Queensland Minister for Transport and Main Roads. Andrew, if you wanted to just pop up to the podium. So we’re going to hear from the Chief Minister first, and then we’ll be hearing from Minister Bailey, and then we’ll have some time for a panel discussion.

Andrew Barr:

Terrific. Thank you very much, Audrey, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. [inaudible 00:00:55] acknowledge the traditional custodians. This is Ngunnawal country and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and I join you today as a First Minister who has five portfolios. They’re all public, though, and the intersection of those portfolios has been important in working with Minister Rattenbury from the ACT Greens, and my friend and colleague Chris Steel, the ACT Minister for Transport, in bringing together the ACT’s zero emissions strategy. So my roles include First Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Climate Action. I’m Minister for Economic Development, and finally Minister for Tourism, and I welcome all our interstate guests, and please stay for the weekend, on that note.

We have been striving in our jurisdiction to be national leaders. It’s been important for our community and important for our government and the shared priorities that ACT Labor and the ACT Greens have in governing here in the ACT. Our focus has been to work collaboratively where possible through organizations, such as the Board of Treasurers, which is the state and territory body that coordinates our work at a state and territory level in policy areas like taxation and road user charging and other issues that have been raised. Our endeavor, and what we will be seeking from the federal government, is to extend that collaboration that’s been quite effective at a state and territory government level, although not perfect as we have heard, to have a willing partner in the Commonwealth to work towards a national EV strategy.

I think there is a significant opportunity. All jurisdictions, labor, all liberal at a state and territory level are broadly pursuing the same policy direction. Some of the issues at a highly local level will relate to the pace of change and some specific issues that are domained to each jurisdiction. As a veteran of the Australian Federation, I’m into my 16th year, I’ve been on nearly every ministerial council that has ever occurred in our Federation. I know the strengths and weaknesses of this structure of governance. At its best, its collaborative and cooperative and just the right amount of competition to see each other strive to be just that little bit better and drive the nation forward. In other times, it can be highly disruptive, really, really challenging to reach a national consensus and has actually set the nation back. This is one policy area where I think we have an opportunity to make really quick gains.

So I’ve been delighted with what I’ve heard from the federal minister this morning. I commit the ACT to be a constructive partner together with the other states and territories in achieving the sort of national policy framework that I think everyone in this room is looking for, but there does also need to be a little bit of room for tailored local responses, and I particularly want to acknowledge and support the role of local government as a delivery partner. It’s not just about the federal government and states and territories. It’s also important that we involve local government, and that will be, I think, an exciting opportunity in every community in our nation to make a difference, to bring forward the practical delivery of the policy objectives that we’re seeking to reach agreement on at a national level.

But if I’ve learned anything over the last 15 years, it’s that high level national policy intent great, but you’ve got to be able to deliver it in your part of Australia. Now, we stand ready to do that, and I would hope that the result of all of this national policy work is we get a little bit more sophisticated and that we don’t have 20 million EV charges in marginal seats and none in other parts of the nation. And friends, I’ve seen this happen before. So we need to remain sharply focused on a national response but to give that room for a little bit of localized activity.

I’d just like to push the agenda forward a little, though, beyond what we’ve talked about today, and some really worthy initiatives. We also need reforms to our national construction code to enable EV charging infrastructure in new multi-unit and commercial buildings. We need an increased investment from a Commonwealth in a number of these areas, but delivered by the states and territories. I don’t think we need the Commonwealth to try and come in over the top and be a delivery agency in many of these areas. We’ve talked about legislation to phase out the sale of internal combustion vehicles. We’ve obviously led with 2035. I’d like to see other jurisdictions follow that and that become a national position, and clearly we need to develop nationally consistent approaches to road user charging reforms to replace the fuel excise.

Now, I speak as a treasurer here. The nation still needs revenue from motorists. That might be unpopular with some in the room, but there still needs to be a source of revenue to maintain our transport infrastructure. And speaking as a passionate social Democrat who believes in a role for government, this should not be an exercise over the next several decades in reducing government revenue because we will not be in a position to provide the services that we need to into the future. We need to manage this transition. I think we can, and I look forward to being part of that debate.

Thank you.

Audrey Quicke:

Thank you, Chief Minister, and I’d like to invite Minister Bailey up to the podium.

Mark Bailey:

Thanks very much. Can I also acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners on the land in which we gather, and offer my respects to elders past, present, and emerging for a culture that goes back more than 3000 generations. Can I just acknowledge my colleagues, Andrew Barr and Chris Steel from the ACT who are doing such good work, all the federal MPs in the room as well, everyone here. Look, it’s a great time for this country. This country changed on May the 21st after a very dark decade, but we’re only at the beginning of the light at the end of the tunnel. So there is obviously a lot of work to do, but we’ve got to make every post a winner and acknowledge a few truths as well.

The reality is unlike the UK and, say, Germany where there’s bipartisan support for action, that still is not the case here and is probably not likely to be. So all of us who believe in progress have to make every post a winner. We have to avoid the follies that we saw in the Senate in 2009. It’s fragile. We’re strong at the moment. We want to stay strong, that we have a lot of community support for us out there, and we need to keep that relationship fresh and renewed and make sure we take the people with us, and they want to see action. They’re well ahead of where we’ve been in the federal government.

It’s an honor to follow, not just Andrew Barr, but also Tom Coots [inaudible 00:08:19]. We were on the Energy Council together for COAG, and we were very frustrated for a number of years together as we saw blocking and absolutely no action from the federal government, and what we need to do going forward is to make sure that we accelerate change, that we take every opportunity. In Queensland, we are the most vulnerable, I would suggest, to climate change and the extreme weather events. We have already seen that in the last six or seven years, cyclones that escalate from the lowest category to the highest category in 24 hours. We saw the greatest level of rainfall in a three-day period since records began in February and March this year, and of course the bush fire crisis actually started in Queensland when we had to evacuate 10,000 people out of Gracemere because there was a raging fireball headed straight towards it, and we have a thing called The Great Barrier Reef.

So we understand how important action is on climate change and how we are absolutely responsible as a developed, skilled first-world country to do so. But what we’ve seen is a really inadequate situation where in the void of national leadership, in fact, not just a void, an open hostility to action, it’s been the states and territories have stood up and tried to fill that void in the best possible way that we can, to the extent that we could, with the resources that we had. Now, that’s highly, in the end, inadequate despite the good work of the states and the territories because it sends out the wrong signal internationally, and you saw the car companies early on. They need a clear national signal about what this country wants, and they weren’t getting it previously with a patchwork sort of situation.

So I’m really heartened to see the election of the new [inaudible 00:10:20] federal government and the commitments from Chris Bowen this morning, and I had meetings yesterday with Catherine King. The transport minister was in Brisbane for … Obviously, decarbonization was a key thing we discussed two weeks ago at the National Transport Ministers meeting. And out of that, we have the offer to partner from the federal government, all the jurisdictions, about the strategy forward, and that is very heartening. I thank the federal government for that collaboration, that commitment, and is one that we will grasp in Queensland, and I know the other jurisdictions will as well, and of course, the fuel standards announcement is important, too.

So going forward, there’s a lot of work to do, and that national strategy will be key. It will be the first actual authentic, genuine electric vehicle strategy we’ve ever had in this country. We actually haven’t had one at the moment, but what was the previous government’s written policy wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. So going forward, that’s what we’ve got to do, is work together and make every post a winner, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. We’ve got to keep moving forward and take … The community wants us to move forward. They’ve made that very clear with their outcomes in the federal election, and we’ve got to work together to do that, and I think this is a case where industry wants us to do that. And as a country where the relatively small market worldwide right-hand drive, we’ve got to understand where our place is in the world, manufacturing sectors are in terms of automotive.

So that clear signal has to come. I think it will come. I look forward to working with the federal government, Catherine King, very consultative, fantastic minister across her brief, Chris Bowen, the Prime Minister who was in Queensland recently, too. And look, it’s a great opportunity. We’ve got to grasp it. We’ve got to seize the day together and seize every day together to make sure that we can get the progress that we want to see.

Thank you.

Audrey Quicke:

Fantastic. Thank you both. So we’ve obviously heard this announcement from Minister Bowen this morning on fuel efficiency standards. It sounds like we’ve got a discussion paper that’s going to be coming in September, and there has been a warm welcome extended to state and territory governments to participate in that process. So I’m wondering, what are you expecting from fuel efficiency standards, how ambitious do you want them to be, and what sort of timeline are you thinking you’d like to see there?

Mark Bailey:

Look, I don’t want to sort of preempt it, but I think I was interested to see the car company feedback on the panel earlier on. I mean, they just want certainty and clarity, and then they can work with us a lot better. So I don’t want to preempt the process, but we can do a lot better than we’ve been doing. Under the previous government, they kept kicking the can down the road on road user charging. They didn’t want to deal with … We had to fight to have electric vehicles put on the agenda of National Transport Ministers meetings. That’s how absurd it was in this day and age, and we achieved that, but you could see the conservative ministers sort of starting to look at other things and do other stuff: “What are you doing?” “I just weren’t interested in doing that,” and I think that’s an interesting dynamic, is that it’s actually not a bipartisan support here in Australia, whereas in other countries, it has been. I think Australian conservatism’s been taking their cues from the US and Trumpism rather than conservatives in the UK and Germany, and that’s a big change in the last 10 to 15 years around where they take their cues, and I don’t see that changing in the short-term.

Andrew Barr:

Look, having heard all I have this morning, I was thinking 2025 might be the timeframe, but I think what we need is at least Euro 6d by 2024 and possibly earlier. So ACT government will make a submission. I’ll endeavor through the state territory treasurers to see if we can also submit as a board so that all eight states and territories, if we can reach consensus, can put through our treasurers one submission into the process, but I recognize that sometimes that can be challenging in a short time frame, and each jurisdiction may wish to submit individually, but I think there is a sense of momentum and we do need to move on this. So having had the reassurance of hearing from the manufacturers that they’ve actually been preparing for this for some time, a relatively short lead-in and an ambitious target is what we need.

Audrey Quicke:

Hmm, and I think if we’ve learned anything about electric vehicle policy in Australia, it’s that we don’t have to wait for the federal government to act. States really have been leading this for the past few years. Do you expect that to continue to be the case?

Mark Bailey:

Look, I think there’s commitments thereby a lot of the states to do things like the rebate, the $3,000 arrear, which is in the end, a lot smaller than many other national governments. So that will stay in place, but I think there’s got to be a renegotiation of what a genuine national policy looks like. Obviously, the new national government is just still looking at the books working out where they stand having been in opposition. So I think we’ve got to be mindful of that and work with them on that because I think that’s just an inevitable part of that process.

Andrew Barr:

Look, I think a lot more is possible now. When we were developing this, we got to a certain point, thought, well, we just need to see what happens in the federal election to see how ambitious and realistic we can be, and we went further as a result of what happened in May. So I think there is momentum there. The states and territories had to do a lot of heavy lifting over the last decade, and the thing I took from that was that whether it was a state liberal or state labor administration, we were able to work together. I credit people like Matt Keen and others for that bipartisanship and willingness, large and small jurisdictions, to work together. So I think that spirit is there, and having a federal government that we’re not pushing against but everyone is traveling in the same direction now, it does mean you can get your foot on the accelerator, I think.

Audrey Quicke:

Hmm, and I guess we’ve heard quite a bit today about passenger vehicles, particularly, but of course there’s lots of other vehicles that we can be talking about. So I’m interested to hear about buses, electric buses. Where are we at in terms of electrifying bus fleets, and also what would you like to see from the federal government to assist there?

Mark Bailey:

Yeah, look, I think that’s got to be part of the conversation because, obviously, buses make up a significant amount of the air shed. And in Queensland, we’re making some pretty strong progress on that front. Industry’s very interested, so there’s manufacturing going on. We’re seeing electric buses go into not just the Southeast Queensland mark, but up the coast into Cannes and Townsville and others, and industry knows that they’re cheaper to run. They’re better technology. They’re moving into the space pretty well. So I feel optimistic about that.

I think areas that we’ve got to look at is, obviously, freight because we’re actually a small population spread out hugely. So freight, road freight, is actually a big issue for this country. It is particularly for Queensland. We’ve got the biggest road network in the country with only a third of the population. So if we’re looking at emissions, heavy vehicle freights got to be looked at, and I know industry is looking at, and also rail freight, too, because obviously we’ve got a pretty big sector in that regard, and I know that Aurizon, for instance, are looking at hydrogen and what their options are there. I think that’s really good to see, too.

Andrew Barr:

Look, Mark’s touched on, I think, the really key points. An ACT perspective, we’re in procurement at the moment for a significant transition in our bus fleet. Electrification of public transport is an opportunity not just for buses, though, and is my plug for Canberra light rail, and of course, we look to partner with the Commonwealth as the Commonwealth has done with other states to assist in the delivery of that mass public transport. The ACTs also has some specific partnerships in areas like emergency service vehicles, so a partnership with Volvo there. We’re looking at pretty much every vehicle type that we operate because we’re a hybrid of state and local government responsibility. Pretty well every vehicle the government in Australia would seek to procure we’ve got somewhere in our stock. So our challenge, and this will be the case for some of the other smaller jurisdictions, is just the volume of procurement.

So one thing that we would look to is to partner with some of the larger jurisdictions if we can reach a consensus on which technology to go with; just makes it a little bit cheaper and easier for smaller jurisdictions to make the switch. When you are the first and you’re going out alone, it can be challenging and expensive, and the one thing that we’ve also found has been a bit of an inhibitor is our existing energy network. So it’s one thing to procure the buses. It’s another to have the bus stations in the right locations where the electricity network is sufficient to be able to charge them all overnight.

So the logistics of all of this are a little more challenging than just making the sweeping statement of “we should electrify by a certain date.” You’ve actually got to be able to do it. And if we fail at this, then it sets back the cause that I think we are all working towards. So practical delivery, I’ve talked about it a bit. I’m going to continue to talk about it because at our level of government, we’ve got to make it work.

Audrey Quicke:

And I think we’ve got time for one last question. You touched on the electric vehicle tax or road user charging. We’ve also heard that in South Australia, that’s been abolished, and I believe in Victoria, it’s been challenged in the high court at the moment. So what do you see as the federal government’s role in this space?

Andrew Barr:

Okay, well, look, I’ll try and give a 60-second answer to this. Look, we have an emerging challenge. We will need to collect revenue as a nation. Now, states and territories forged ahead here because we could see what was coming, and frankly, because we all suffer the scourge of vertical fiscal imbalance, that is that the Commonwealth collects all the revenue but we have a responsibility for service delivery, and so there’s a fiscal deficit effectively. We saw an opportunity to try and collaborate and to see this growing revenue source come to state and territory governments. The Commonwealth, eye to the main prize, are seeing their main … a very significant revenue source diminishing over time, and the more EVs are on the road, the lower the amount of fuel tax that the Commonwealth will collect. At some point, obviously, we are going to have to have a meeting of minds on this question and work out how we can fairly share the revenue.

But again, speaking as a veteran of this federation, there’s nothing like revenue coming into your own treasury, not that is passed to you at the behest or goodwill of another treasurer at another level of government. So the states and territories do have a collective interest here in being able to harmonize but also collect the revenue ourselves, and it does intersect, of course, with state-based registration schemes, as I’ve indicated where we’re looking to move to an emissions-based process rather than a weight-based process on registrations.

That was way more than 60 seconds. I apologize.

Audrey Quicke:

Minister Bailey.

Mark Bailey:

Look, I’ve been critical of bringing in or even giving the signal out on road user charge too early because I think we’ve seen such anemic sales of electric vehicles where we are nowhere near critical mass yet. So I think that while we’ve had conflicting signals going out because of no national leadership and it’s been the states and the territories doing the heavy lifting, I think until we get some real momentum and it becomes inexorable, I’m very cautious about us sending out signals that aren’t kind of clear about our way forward. So there will need to be a renegotiation about how we pay for roads, no doubt about that whatsoever. Do we want to be saying that right now, or do we want to … Let’s get the units moving. Let’s get the inexorable transition to clean energy happening. I think everyone accepts that EV drivers have to pay their way, but at the moment, the numbers are so small that it’s not an issue at the moment, but let’s get the momentum going first and then have that negotiation, is my view.

Audrey Quicke:

So unfortunately that’s all we’re going to have time for now. Just a big round of applause, please, for our two panelists. Thank you.

The post What We Need From Federal Government Part 1 – EV Summit first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.

What We Need From Federal Government Part 2 – EV Summit 2022

Katie — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:19:39 +0000

Speaker 1:

So I’m pleased to introduce our next speakers. We have Green’s deputy leader, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, the President of the Australian Local Government Association, Counselor Linda Scott, and also CEO of Climateworks Centre, Anna Skarbek. We’re continuing with the theme of what we’d like to see at that federal level. I’d like to invite Senator Faruqi to kick us off. As deputy leader of the Greens, what do you think is needed from the federal government to accelerate this transition to electric vehicles? And please feel free to take the podium.

Mehreen Faruqi:

I will. I do have a few things to say, so I’ll go and stand up there on the podium.

Good afternoon, everyone. I acknowledge the sovereign owners of the land that we’re gathered on, the Nanowel people, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. No matter where we are in this country, we are on stolen land. Sovereignty was never seated. This is, always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

I think everyone knows the road we are traveling on, and where we are going to get to eventually. The question is, does Australia want to be in the slow lane or the fast lane? I listen very closely today to the Minister, and I welcome that he’s committing to drive us a little bit faster and further down the road, but it seems to me that the government is going to keep us idling instead of accelerating towards our electric future. I know that we can go much, much faster if the Commonwealth chooses to do so.

I want to outline four key areas of policy that the Greens believe are necessary for us to switch lanes and to drive faster, to join the electric vehicle revolution. But first, I want to say a few things about the election and the Parliament. It’s clear that there is a great hunger from the voters for climate action, and a clean energy future. The Greens, and much of the crossbench took stronger climate and energy policies to the election than the two old parties. Our vote went up, Labor and Liberal’s vote went backwards. The Parliament should be a climate action Parliament. It should be a Parliament that electrifies the nation. The numbers are there, in the lower house and in the Senate. The only thing holding back greater action is the level of ambition from Labor. So we all have a job to do, to convince Labor to be willing to go faster and do much, much more, quicker.

So our view is clear, and we took that to the election. We need policies to push out old, dirty, and obsolete vehicles, and policies to bring in clean, better, more efficient electric vehicles. We need the infrastructure to power up Australia’s new electric vehicles, and also our manufacturing industry. I’ll take these areas one by one. The United States, China, Japan, and Europe have had mandatory vehicle emission standards for decades. We’ve been having this conversation in Australia for decades as well, but we still don’t have those standards. We don’t need more reviews or more consultations to decide whether we want ambitious mandatory emission standards. It shouldn’t be a question of if we do this, but how we do this, and how we do this right now. The government is about to remove its fuel excise discount, and we are in a cost of living crisis, with high fuel costs driven by our dependence on the rest of the world for fuel security.

Surely there is no better time than now to be introducing pollution standards that will save people money. Surely it makes sense to depend on the sun, not the ongoing extraction of climate-destroying, planet-killing fossil fuels. So the Greens want to see vehicle fuel efficiency standards, or CO2 emission standards, starting with 105 grams per kilometer, ratcheting down to zero by 2030, and a ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, to bring us in line with leading countries like the United Kingdom. We would invest $1.2 billion to support manufacturers of electric vehicles and their components, building the Australian EV manufacturing industry. As an engineer, I’ve been trained to solve problems, and the prospect of remaking manufacturing in Australia while simultaneously addressing the climate crisis really is exhilarating for me. This manufacturing renaissance must be just, it must be ethical and sustainable, with decent jobs for workers.

We will need a much more intensive and extensive network of charging than what the government has currently committed to. We want to see $2 billion invested in publicly-owned EV fast charging networks. The Greens want to see a $10,000 subsidy on every first electric vehicle, decreasing over time as the take up of these vehicles increases. We want low-cost finance provided by the government to remove the cost barriers, and to ensure equity, which is a big part of what we want to do. These measures really aren’t controversial in the rest of the world, and they shouldn’t be here either. These policies implemented together really would turbocharge Australia towards an electric vehicles take off, just as other countries have done. It would cost a tiny fraction of the government’s $224 billion tax cut for Australia’s richest, which should be invested in people and the planet. So the Greens really want to work with you to ensure that the government does shift gears, and takes on a much more ambitious electric vehicle agenda in the months and years to come. I really look forward to working with all of you to make that happen. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, Senator. Linda, we heard from Chief Minister Barr earlier that local governments really do have a big role to play in this transition as well, from deploying infrastructure to transitioning their own fleets, to helping communities transition. What are local governments doing at the moment, and what sort of support are you looking for from the federal government?

Linda Scott:

Thanks for the great question. I’d like to begin, too, by acknowledging that we meet on the land of the Nanowel people, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I’d also like to actually acknowledge and credit Andrew Barr. In addition to his great advocacy for the work of local governments, he’s also the reason I own and now drive an electric vehicle. We had a recent discussion about it. So it’s very exciting to know that he’s a champion for the industry literally, and he’s able to increase the uptake more than that 2% that we’re all working towards together. I want to acknowledge that there has been great leadership, in particular from the announcements today from Minister Bowen, and as local governments we really welcome that. It’s my job acknowledging that I’m a Labor counselor to represent the nation’s 537 local governments. As you can imagine, every political stripe in the nation, but all very united in our acknowledgment that all these major transitions, and in particular the one we’re speaking about today, the energy transition, needs to have a very place-based focus.

So for local governments, first and foremost from the Commonwealth, we need recognition that local governments are going to be critical partners in this transition, and without local governments playing a lead role in creating those place-based solutions, the transition will not be possible. The second thing local governments need from the Commonwealth, to again, the chief minister’s point, is funding. We support and run and maintain 70% of the nation’s roads. In New South Wales, my home state, it’s as high as 90%. So for all of you with a vested interest in making sure that your roads aren’t covered in potholes, there does need to be some funding support for local governments to continue to maintain our road network. And of course, in the face of climate change, where we are seeing more damage to all our assets, including roads, that is going to be a really critical step.

And finally, I think just simply having a Commonwealth government that is showing leadership to drive this transition, excuse the pun, is so crucial. For so many years now, local governments have been providing local leadership in very different ways across the nation. In the local governments, for example, surrounding my own in the city of Sydney, they have set up their own charging structures to ensure that residents can make the transition. So many local governments, particularly in regional areas, have been working very hard to incentivize their communities to make the transition through the way that they, for example, charge for their parking permits, or the way that they permit street parking, or the way that we provide benefits for our public spaces generally. So local governments have been doing this leadership in local ways differently across the nation, but having a national goal to lock in behind, and then incentivize our communities in all those different ways to make that transition, is really the critical thing. So leadership, funding, and recognition of our important status as a partner in implementing this transition, are the three things we need, and we are really hopeful that they’re going to be forthcoming as part of the strategy that the ministers announced today.

Speaker 1:

And Anna at Climateworks Centre has released a report, I think just this week, looking at policies to realize Australia’s electric vehicle potential. Oh, there we go. Fuel efficiency standards, it’s what we’re all chatting about right now. That was one of many policies that you identified. What else did you canvas in that report?

Anna Skarbek:

Yes. Thanks Audrey. Indeed, Exhibit A, published this week for this summit, and it outlines a six step approach to a national EV strategy, and supply is step one of that. So fuel efficiency standards, as we’ve heard today, is an excellent start. It’s actually step one-A, and in one-B, part of supply includes the second hand import market. We’ve heard today about the need for a single harmonized set of policies. There are a lot of checks and procedures and constraints on importing secondhand cars. That can be improved, that is squarely within the remit of government, federal and state, but working together, which has been the promise that we’ve heard today. So do not delay on that, because those two measures are very important for supply. Step two is targets to show the ambition, and these are powerful symbolically to state the future ambition, but they also are a promise of continued further action, and set guidance as we’ve seen from markets, which also can inform consumer awareness and the actions of many other layers of government.

We heard about a lot about choice today. Minister Bond spoke about choice. And the important choice to remember when we’re thinking about what ambition to set a target at, is that the choice that’s driving a lot of this is that we have chosen to fully decarbonize our world to save our planet from increasing global warming. And so that choice, which we’ve all made through the Paris Agreement, is to limit global warming to well under two degrees, and strive for 1.5. The 1.5 degree limit is the one that the major financial institutions globally have now aligned to. So in this report, Climateworks has presented 1.5 and two degree alignment targets. What that means when you cascade down to electric vehicles, the two degree aligned target is at the 50% new sales level by 2030, but 1.5 degree aligned is 76%. We know that the Paris Agreement requires a ratchet, and we know that all of Australia’s major banks have committed to the international net zero banking alliance, which aims for 1.5 alignment.

We also know that that is the difference between the Great Barrier Reef recovering from coral bleaching on average in a decade, or not. At two degrees of warming, on average coral, bleaching occurs eight or nine years in 10. At two degrees of warming, on average, Australia would have millennial droughts, deep drought years, eight or nine years in 10. But at one and a half degrees of warming, it’s more like 4, 5, 6, maybe seven, depending on what you’re modeling. That is a time for an ecosystem to recover, for regional communities to recover. So it’s, for us, undoubtedly obvious that the data is leaning us all towards 1.5 degree alignment, and that’s where the banks and institutions have taken it as well. So that is where the Paris Agreement ratchet will take the required national commitments. So set the target for 76% around that new sales of electric vehicles by 2030, that’s the 1.5 degrees aligned target.

What then? Stimulate demand. Supply is the first criteria, but that doesn’t mean that demand support stops. So there’s a lot of work to do in rebalancing the tax exemptions that we’ve talked about today. Utes are popular today because they get FBT exemptions. We’re seeing state governments use tax revenue for subsidies, and there is an opportunity to rebalance a lot of that. So continuing the demand support is really important, and that includes fleet procurement. We heard from the New South Wales Minister, there is a lot of power that governments and corporates can do to set targets aligned with those 1.5 degree aligned targets. Many corporates now have net zero targets. So increasing the awareness and accountability of those, and converting that into fleet procurement commitment, and allowing that bulk purchasing power to drive demand is a really important goal.

Fourth is infrastructure. For a smooth transition, there is a lot to do here. I’m also really excited about it, because it’s squarely within the remit of governments. So we’ve heard a lot about charging, that is one of half a dozen measures. The key theme here about planning for the infrastructure, we’ve talked about targets, the theme that drives this mindset is back casting. We’ve heard today about the S-curve of technology adoption, and there’s a lot of discussion about getting us from two to 10, and then up that curve. But when you’re thinking about infrastructure, what matters is, what does the top of the curve look like? Our net zero commitment means we are committed to fully decarbonizing transport. Now, we’ve all talked here, we know that means. Every car’s going to be electric. Well, until last year, Aemo’s ISP grid planning scenarios did not include analysis of full electrification of cars or homes or industry.

It now does, but there is a lot of work to do for Australia’s information architecture to include and improve the analyses of what does our world look like, our electricity grid look like, down to the substation level, under multiple scenarios of 100% decarbonized transport. So when you then plan your infrastructure for that, obviously, charging infrastructure we’ve talked about, impacts local planning and rules. Importantly, it also impacts construction. National construction code was mentioned today. There is an opportunity for all governments to act on in seven day’s time. The Building Ministers meeting is occurring on the 26th of August. We have spent a decade advocating for the minimum energy efficiency standards to lift from six star to seven star, and that is before the Building Ministers meeting in seven days from now. It’s great, it’s late, but the default seven star definition, this is for all new homes, is a provision in relation to electric vehicles for 25% readiness. So that is that the wiring is put in, that 25% of an apartment block, for example, could have EV charging.

We encourage every government attending the Building Ministers meeting next week, federal and state, to accept the recommendations of ours and others, that that 25% be reset to 100. You can do that in seven day’s time. If that’s failed at the collective level, states can do it themselves to go above the minimum, and then we’re back in patchwork land, big moment missed. We heard the New South Wales treasurer say there’s $10 million of taxpayer funding in New South Wales going to retrofitting apartments to add charging. How many more millions will be added for the difference between 25% and 100% for every new building after 2022, if we’re going to have to retrofit the other 75% because we have a national commitment to fully decarbonize? There is, in fact, a state commitment to fully decarbonize as well. So thinking joined-,up government net zero commitments across all layers of our economy and all sectors.

Speaker 1:

And one other thing that I noticed in the report, that it really stresses that we need to prioritize a fair EV transition. So I noticed that you talk about targeting financial support to low-income individuals and families, also ensuring that renters have the same access to some of that charging infrastructure. So keen to hear your thoughts on what the federal government can do to ensure that this is a fair transition.

Mehreen Faruqi:

Thank you very much, Anna, for that report. I think it’s an excellent piece of work, I had a read of it last night. But I think equity, which isn’t talked about too much, is really crucial for making this transformation. We know at the moment, the vast majority of EVs belong to men, high-income earners, and to make sure that when we move from 2% to 100% over the next some years, that it is distributed and people on low and middle income also have the capacity and the opportunity to get EVs. A few things that I mentioned, which is subsidies and rebates, I think are really, really crucial, and the federal government should come in. It also goes to manufacturing EVs here, and our policy is basically if people buy EVs manufactured in Australia, then they can get a bigger subsidy. So that’s encouraging the industry here as well.

I think supply is a big part of it, because the more models we have, we can get cheaper models in. Also, charging stations and where they are put. I think Minister Barr mentioned earlier, shouldn’t be in electorates where people want to win votes, but it has to be done everywhere, and especially in regional areas. It’s a big issue of equity in regional areas. And lastly, EV of course is part of the puzzle, but public transport and making public transport available and affordable for everyone, and also active transport like cycling and working is also a big part of the puzzle, not just in terms of equity, but also us moving to a world which is zero carbon.

Linda Scott:

So on that, I want to call out Steve Murphy, who’s the National Secretary of the Metal Workers Union. He’ll be speaking this afternoon. There’s been a lot of focus today, I think, on fairness and consumers, but not a lot of focus on the transition that’s needed within the workforce in Australia, but critically even to make that very specific to electric vehicles, the transition that we’re going to need in the skills to ensure that we are able to manufacture, and look after, and maintain all these kinds of vehicles for the future. We are, as a local government sector, really quite interested, again, in place-based solutions to a lot of these challenges. So to take an example that we’ve undertaken in a different domain, the Sydney councils have come together. We take all the glass that we receive in our recycling bins. We’ve sought to try to set up a new manufacturing hub in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, of course an area that also needs to undertake a very significant workforce transition.

And then the local governments have made a commitment to buy that produced material back, in the form of road base or footpath or cycleway base. So we are creating a circular economy, and at the same time ensuring that the workforce in a region that needs to make a transition is able to have new or very similar occupations that allow them to utilize their skills. We see that there is a capacity to create these other place-based solutions to create this energy transition, and also to foster the workforce that we need, and particularly focusing on those areas where the workforce needs to have opportunities to make that transition. I’m looking forward with Steve and others to putting forward some of these ideas at the federal government’s upcoming skills and job summit. What we are really trying to highlight here as local governments, is that we can provide the solutions to so many of the problems that we have at our policy level, but it requires all levels of government working together, and it requires respect for the local government leadership that is bringing together all different kinds of policy to create solutions on the ground.

Unlike Andrew Barr, I hope this is respectful, I mean it respectfully. Unlike Andrew Barr, I’m not a veteran of Australia’s Federation, but I do as ALGA’s President have the rather unique opportunity to attend most of the intergovernmental forum. So whether it’s National Cabinet, the Treasurers meetings, the Transport Ministers meetings, the energy, I attend most of them. It is quite a unique perspective to be able to see all these different forums, and the overlap and the discussions that are happening. It is going to be a really critical time to get those settings right, so that the nation can better work together. I’m very hopeful, having seen the changes that the Albanese government has already made, and the review that is underway, of course, by Prime Minister and Cabinet, that we will get those governance settings right to make these transitions work, because let’s be frank, without it this won’t occur.

Whether it be in electric vehicles or in emissions transitions more generally, Australian local governments collect 4% of the nation’s tax take, our untied funding from the Commonwealth under the Keating government was at 1% of Commonwealth’s taxation revenue. It’s now down to nearly half that. We have, of course, local governments in our regions that are so impacted by climate disasters, they are effectively insolvent, and having no local government in an area is not going to produce a locally-led recovery when we can’t even afford to procure the truck or employ the workers to go and pick up people’s rubbish. So we do need some fundamental thinking about the funding structures. As you can imagine, representing 537 local governments, we don’t take a view about road taxes or other more specific dilemmas for the Commonwealth and the states, but more broadly, without some better equitable funding distribution, those local solutions that you all need to stimulate the significant transition to more electric vehicles, and indeed 100%, simply will not occur.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time for now. We’re running a little bit over time, so please join me in thanking all of our speakers.

The post What We Need From Federal Government Part 2 – EV Summit 2022 first appeared on Electric Vehicle Council.