The Morrison government now believes that one in four new car sales in Australia will be electric by 2030, but is facing renewed calls to deliver a dedicated national electric vehicle strategy to jump-start the uptake of EVs.
In letters seen by The Driven, cross-bench Senator Rex Patrick has written to federal energy minister Angus Taylor and transport minister Michael McCormack, calling on the Morrison government to deliver on a promised national electric vehicle strategy.
The strategy, which was first flagged in February 2019, has yet to see the light of day and the Morrison government’s EV policy has amounted to a lot of nonsensical rhetoric in last year’s election campaign, a one page government fact sheet, and repeated assurances that something would be released sometime in 2020.
The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources has told The Driven that the government will soon release a consultation paper for a ‘Future Fuels’ strategy, which it says will replace the planned electric vehicle strategy.
A spokesperson for the department could only confirm that the consultation paper would be released ‘in due course’.
The change in approach allows the Morrison government to broaden the strategy to cover a broader range of transport technologies including hydrogen, biofuels and hybrid vehicles.
But Senator Patrick says that a dedicated electric vehicle strategy was still crucial, as there were key issues that related specifically to electric vehicle uptake that needed to be addressed and coordinated at a national level.
Patrick says Australia needs to set specific targets for electric vehicle uptake, as well as providing a clear path for coordinating policies between the federal and state governments to avoid a scattergun approach to policy measures and to address potential cross-border issues.
Earlier this week, Patrick met with electric vehicle enthusiasts who had converged on Parliament House in Canberra, along with a Hyundai Ioniq, to drum up support for a petition calling on the premiers of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales to back down from plans to introduce new electric vehicle taxes.
A senate inquiry into electric vehicles, in which Patrick participated, found that the emerging industry would deliver substantial benefits to the Australian economy, through opportunities to revitalise manufacturing and by cutting air pollution, but the Morrison government has not acted on the recommendations of the inquiry.
In a separate speech to federal parliament on Wednesday, senator Patrick said that Australia’s electric vehicles were effectively ‘battery dead’, and pointed to a number of overseas governments that were moving to ban the sale of fossil fuel vehicles to encourage uptake of electric vehicles.
“The world is shifting away from internal combustion engines. So this is not a decision that the government has to make. It’s a decision that’s actually been made by the car manufacturers who have announced they’re moving away from internal combustion engine cars.”
“So we need to think very, very careful about carefully about this, we need to be investing in the future. We need to be getting the infrastructure in place necessary for the rollout of electric vehicles that includes more than just charging stations,” Patrick added.
The United Kingdom and the European Union are already set to ban the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles within the next ten years, with Japan set to do the same by 2035. Norway will do so by 2025.
Updated greenhouse gas emissions projections released by the Morrison government shows that it expects electric vehicles will make up 26 per cent of all new vehicle sales in 2030, and by the end of the decade there will be 1.3 million electric vehicles on the road.
The call from senator Patrick mirrors the advice being provided to state governments, with recently leaked documents showing that electric vehicle policies, including potential new taxes targeting electric vehicles, needed to be coordinated between governments to avoid perverse outcomes.
“We need to have a sensible standalone National Electric Vehicle strategy to maximize the economic, environmental and social benefits that electric vehicles can bring,” Patrick told parliament. “We need to have a national strategy that actually intersects and operates with and is worked up in conjunction with the states.”
“We should be setting a targets and we should also be legislating to to get clear fuel efficiency standards to give certainty the to the private sector, we should also be backing our own manufacturers to build our own EV’s rather than just importing them.”