Another opinion piece about the unfairness of the fuel excise as EV drivers don’t pay it. It would be fine if the issue was about fairness however it is really about rapidly decarbonising cars. We are faced with a rolling train wreck with our fossil fuel caused climate crisis. We need to electrify everything and now is not the time to talk about taxes the penalise people making the change. Certainly a change is needed to ensure the budget can be balanced but not at the expense of slowing the transition for perceived “fairness”. The system is inherently unfair as it is designed to boost EV sales and drive the transition.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/as-more-evs-hit-the-road-this-gap-in-our-tax-system-needs-fixing-20260326-p5zj11.html

#evs #FuelExcise #RoadUserCharge #ElectrifyEverything #climatecrisis #auspol

And putting my AEVA advocacy hat on, I'd encourage all drivers to read AEVA's position on Road User Charges:

https://www.aeva.asn.au/files/3915/

In short: most EV drivers are in favour of paying a road usage charge. But we want to see this done fairly: all vehicles should have to pay this charge. So the fuel excise would be scrapped in favour of the road user charge applying to all vehicles that use roads. The road user charge would be calculated so it was equivalent to the overall cost of the fuel excise so the whole process would not cost "the industry" any more than they currently pay. Then wind up the fuel tax credit scheme because road usage charges only apply to vehicles driven on public roads and the FTC is to reimburse users of heavy vehicles that use diesel that includes the fuel excise cost.

BTW, if you want unfair, petrol car drivers should be more than a little irate that the trucking industry, which does hundreds of times more damage to the roads than cars, pays one tenth of the fuel excise that car drivers do.

#EV #AEVA #roadusercharge #roadusagecharge