“Like a rocket:” Federal Liberal MP buys herself a Tesla Model 3

Federal Liberal MP Katie Allen has broken ranks from her Coalition colleagues and risked ruining her weekend by buying a Tesla Model 3 electric car. And like NSW Liberal energy minister Matt Kean, the first Australian MP to buy one, she loves it.

Allen’s purcase of the “Liberal blue” Tesla Model 3 was revealed in the Murdoch media, the organisation that amplified the federal Coalition’s extraodinary campaign against Labor’s EV policy that it brought to the last election campaign.

The member for Higgins, in Melbourne, was obviously please with the publicity, Tweeting the story and adding the comments: “The accelerator pedal is like a dodgem car, but the acceleration is like a rocket.

“Hang on to your sunglasses when you drive this baby.”

In the item in The Australian, which only made it to a gossip column, Allen was more circumspect.

“I love my Tesla, it’s like an iPhone on wheels,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s a bit like a dodgem car, you don’t use your foot on the brake at all. It stops when you take your foot off the accelerator,” she said.

She even intends to drive it to Canberra, which shouldn’t be too hard given the number of Tesla super-chargers en route. “I think there’s no doubt EVs are coming, it’s just a matter of when they’ll get here,” she said. “We just need to make sure there’s infrastructure to support it, and that we back getting there sooner rather than later.”

Perhaps she can convince some of her senior Coalition colleagues, who have been sprouting so much nonsense about electric vehicles they have forgotten to put any policies in place, and could not even bring themselves to focus on EVs in their laughable, hybrid focused “future fuels strategy”, dubbed FFS.

Luckily for Allen, the timing of her purchase meant she was able to cash in on the Victoria Labor government’s new $3,000 rebate, although she will have to pay the state’s controversial 2.5c a kilometre road tax from July 1, which would cost her around $35 for the return trip to Canberra.