What I find particularly interesting about this is that the reason the tax was struck down is that it was deemed an “excise”, which only the Commonwealth can impose. But also that the result was very close, 4-3. I’d love to hear what lawyers think about the case from a strictly legal perspective.
From the moral perspective, sooner or later we will need to have something like this. Cars are insanely expensive on society and on our governments, and putting as much of the charge on their users as possible is just good governance. But as much as all cars are bad and electric cars are cars. The electric part of electric cars makes them slightly less bad than ICE vehicles. So their uptake should be encouraged relative to ICE vehicles, even while policies encouraging public and active transport should be the most supported.
Add an excise like this once EV uptake is upwards of 50% of new vehicles, not right now. If you want to help your government’s budget, try subsidising ebikes more and encouraging their uptake by mandating every route have safe separated cycleways. That will reduce damage done to the roads a lot more than the fraction of repair costs this excise would have delivered.
It’s going to be interesting seeing what other stamp duties were unconstitutional all long, but not tested in a court of law.
I agree that there needs to be some way EV users contribute to infrastructure. They still use the same highways as ICE vehicles, and they’re generally actually heavier too.
Maybe this should be done on a Federal level and maybe be a fixed cost instead of having to do it based on use (which seemed to be a bureaucratic nightmare in Victoria).
Hmm. We do pay income tax on the money made at the other end of the commute. The excises as proposed were a very small percentage of the tax that I already pay, were I to commute by an electric car (I use a different EV, of the two wheeled kind). I’d propose that the issue here is that government revenues come from so many random sources that it’s almost impossible to balance that against an individual’s usage of any government service or utility. Should I be paying more tax because I pay child support and therefore use more of that department’s time? Should people who have kids pay more because the kids are in school?
