Electric vehicle road user charge 'almost inevitable', Infrastructure Partnerships Australia CEO Adrian Dwyer declares
According to The Australian, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is considering "accelerating work on a modest road-user charge for electric vehicle drivers" as part of major tax reforms.
This could mean EV drivers would contribute to road and construction repair.
Funds currently mostly come from the fuel excise which accounts for 51.6 cents per litre of petrol or diesel sold in Australia - costing the average household more than $1200 per year.
A discussion of the charge was organised by think tank Infrastructure Partnerships Australia where leaders across public policy and industry gathered ahead of next week's productivity roundtable.
Infrastructure Partnership Australia's chief executive Adrian Dwyer spoke with Business Now on Monday where he warned a 'terminal decline' in fuel excise meant the government had to widen its scope on vehicle levies.
'It's a good thing that those electric vehicles are coming in for emissions reduction, but they still use roads,' Mr Dwyer said on Business Now.
'Roads have to be paid for and everybody should pay their fair share for making sure that they're built and maintained.'
He stressed a road-user charge was an 'update' to the tax system which was 'outdated' and should not be considered a 'new tax'.
It comes as New Zealand has already unveiled plans to scrap the fuel excise and instead have all light vehicles, including petrol, diesel, electric and hybrid, pay a levy based on distance travelled and the weight of the vehicle after it implement a trial of the policy.
Mr Dwyer pointed to Australia's trans-Tasman neighbours as an example of how a charge could be implemented.
'The sky didn't fall in,' he said.
'(The New Zealand government) announced earlier this week that they're extending their program and putting a more user-friendly approach in.
'Many US states are trialling this. This is not novel or unique anymore, it's actually almost inevitable now that this has to be the way we go to update our road system and it can be a way of accelerating uptake of electric vehicles as well.'
A road user charge would force wealthy Australians with deep pockets to contribute towards the quality of the nation's roads.
Some of the cheapest new Tesla models cost shoppers almost $60,000, while Audi EVs start from about $100,000 and cheap BMWs are about $80,000.
The cheapest new EVs in Australia are about $32,000, however, most vehicles start from at least $60,000.
Mr Chalmers said in June that the Albanese government was looking to work with various state and territories 'on the future of road user charging'.
'Now all of this represents a big agenda on the supply side of our economy. And none of these reforms are simple,' Mr Chalmers told the National Press Club at the time.
'All of them require sustained collective effort and they'll take time to show up in the data.'
The Productivity Commission's report issued last week also called for a national road user charge that would force EV drivers to contribute to road maintenance.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
2 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Victoria and WA's surging crime stats expose The Conversation expert's claim that Australia is becoming less violent
The term 'gaslighting' was born in the arts, but it found its true home in academia. And today, nowhere is the practice more pervasive than in Australia's universities. As readers know all too well, these institutions have become safe havens for left-leaning gaslighters, skilled at persuading the public that what they see and hear can't be trusted. It's a culture built on denial, where tidy theories and carefully scrubbed statistics are paraded out to wash away the fears, frustrations, and daily struggles of ordinary Australians. The latest example comes courtesy of Griffith University's Samara McPhedran, who confidently informs the nation that violent crime isn't rising. Such a claim presents a very narrow-minded version of reality. It's the kind of contrived intellectual thought that can only survive in the stale, insulated air of a lecture theatre, far from the streets where the damage is actually done. Perhaps Dr. McPhedran should speak with the families in Victoria watching their state's crime rate surge by 15 percent in a single year, each percentage point measured in stolen cars, broken bones, and lives violently knocked off course. Or she should consider the lengths the Victorian Allan government have gone to recently in an attempt to reduce violent crime, including the bizarre move to place more than 40 bins at police stations across the state so machete-wielding gangsters can safely dispose of their weaponry. She might then visit the residents of Perth's suburbs, where more than 25 suburbs have endured crime surges topping 30 percent in just 12 months. Perhaps she should speak with the parents who bolt their doors before the sun slips behind the rooftops, with the shopkeepers sweeping glass from their doorways for the twentieth time this year, with the pensioners who have abandoned the short walk to the corner shop because the risk now outweighs the reward. Instead, she remains sealed inside a bubble, an elitist echo chamber utterly detached from the realities and hardships of the people whose lives her theories claim to explain. If McPhedran's analysis reads like a masterclass in sidestepping the obvious, that's because it is. She leans on decades-old datasets, sanding down the jagged spikes of recent surges with long-term averages that bury the scale of the problem and don't engage with other aspects, such as recent rises in crime rates generally. In Victoria alone, police logged 627,268 criminal offences over a single twelve-month stretch (a shocking 17.1 per cent jump). Youth offenders now dominate robbery figures. In the 12 months to March 2025, according to the Crime Statistics Agency a range of theft offences were up significantly: motor vehicle theft was up 39.3 per cent, theft of number plates up 49.6 per cent and retail theft up 38.6 per cent. Cost-of-living pressures have driven this type of crime to levels that are breaking small businesses. Knife attacks have cut through once-secure communities, turning quiet shopping strips into places where tension lingers with every step. Yet McPhedran waves it away, insisting that reliable statistics aren't always available and that violent crime rates have fallen when compared to decades ago. When the evidence refuses to fit, she doesn't grapple with it. Unlike the principal research fellow, the public doesn't have the luxury of retreating into a spreadsheet. They live with the fallout of policy failure every day. They watch as the Albanese government's soft-on-crime stance emboldens offenders who know that the most likely consequence of repeat theft or assault is a token caution, not a meaningful sentence. They see state governments trial diversion programs that sound virtuous in a seminar room but collapse in the chaos of real streets with real victims. And while those failures multiply, academics step forward to supply the intellectual alibi for political leaders more intent on shielding their ideology than shielding their citizens. This is the point where the insulated arrogance of modern academia ceases to be an oddity and becomes a political weapon. Theories that clash with lived experience might remain harmless curiosities if they stayed buried in dusty journals, but they never do. They seep into ministerial speeches and bureaucratic talking points; they harden into legislative proposals. They turn genuine public concern into a 'perception problem' to be managed, not solved. Once that narrative takes root, the facts are bent until they break. The modern university system is built to protect that narrative. Scholars who dare to challenge progressive orthodoxy on crime, immigration, or public order find themselves quietly cut off from funding, promotions, and platforms. Those who repeat it are crowned as 'independent experts,' their words treated as gospel by journalists eager to paint public dissent as nothing more than hysteria. The result is a closed loop in which those most insulated from the damage their ideas cause are the very ones most empowered to write the laws everyone else must live under. Over time, this drip-feed of denial trains the public to second-guess themselves—until eventually, we begin to gaslight ourselves. Mention the knife-wielding teenagers roaming your streets, and you'll be branded a paranoid provocateur. Point to the boarded-up shopfronts in your town, and you'll be told you're cherry-picking. Describe a loved one's assault on public transport, and you'll get a lecture about 'isolated incidents.' The aim is not to convince you you're wrong; it's to make you doubt you were ever right. This gaslighting reaches far beyond crime statistics; it's now woven into the reflexes of Australia's academic and political class. The unspoken assumption is always that ordinary people misread reality, while they alone hold a higher, purer truth. In a university setting, that arrogance is tedious – but in the halls of power, it's lethal. Crime policy leaves no margin for theoretical blunders; every wrong assumption is paid for in screaming sirens, scared citizens, and suburbs drained of trust. Australians deserve far more than ivory-tower ignorance. They deserve leaders willing to face brutal truths—men and women prepared to say plainly that crime is climbing and the nation is hurting. They also deserve to know that the truth on their streets outweighs the fairy tales pushed by officials whose paychecks depend on avoiding inconvenient facts. And they deserve academics who leave the seminar room for the suburbs, who speak with business owners, walk with police, and listen—really listen—to victims. Because only then can their theories carry the weight of the world they claim to explain. John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.
Sky News AU
2 hours ago
- Sky News AU
‘Bad news' for Treasurer Jim Chalmers' major focus on productivity, economic growth after RBA downgrades outlook
Australian mortgage holders were promised financial relief when the Reserve Bank of Australia cut rates on Tuesday, but the good news was shrouded by the central bank painting a bleak picture of the economy. Alongside lowering the cash rate to 3.6 per cent, the RBA downgraded its medium-term productivity assumption to just 0.7 per cent year-on-year, down from its previous assumption of one per cent. It also warned Australia's economy was incapable of growing faster than two per cent over its forecasts. This comes as a major blow to Treasurer Jim Chalmers who has focused his sights on the nation's growth and productivity during the second Albanese government. HSBC's chief economist Paul Bloxham, who is also a former RBA economist, said the RBA's call was a blow for the nation's economic outlook. 'It is absolutely bad news that productivity is going backwards at the moment,' Mr Bloxham said on Business Now. 'And it's bad news that it's going backwards and it's been so weak that the central bank has been actually having to revise down its own working assumption because it had an unrealistically high assumption.' He stressed that growth was picking up pace, but that these fresh insights from the RBA hammered in the idea that Australians 'shouldn't expect the economy to grow much faster" than it currently is. 'If the supply side of the economy is going to remain weak, as the RBA is now assuming - potential growth rate for the economy, as they've said, is two per cent,' Mr Bloxham said. Australia's productivity will take centre stage at Mr Chalmers' upcoming economic roundtable next week where leaders across policy, business and unions will gather to tackle the lagging economy. After the RBA handed down its rate cut, the Treasurer was adamant Australia was equipped to tackle the nation's productivity problem. 'Productivity is the most serious economic challenge we have in our economy when it comes to those persistent structural issues,' Mr Chalmers told reporters. 'Productivity is the main one and that's why it is a central focus of the reform round table next week. 'That challenge has been long standing. It is also global, as the Reserve Bank points out. 'But it is substantial and it is the government's primary focus - not just next week, at the roundtable, but indeed for the course of this parliamentary term.' RBA governor Michele Bullock warned lower productivity growth could dent quality of life for Australians. "The way we grow our living standards is through productivity. So that's the key," Ms Bullock told reporters after the rate decision. She also warned real wages would continue to stagnate amid sluggish productivity. "Weaker productivity growth in the terms of our forecasts - the implications of that ... are already being felt," Ms Bullock said. "Real wages are not rising by very much, because the implication of slow productivity growth is that real wages can't grow as quickly."
Sky News AU
2 hours ago
- Sky News AU
'Appalling mistake': Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ‘adopts' language of terrorists in calling slain fighters ‘martyrs'
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has come under fire for 'adopting the language of terrorists' during his press conference to announce Australia would recognise a Palestinian state. Mr Albanese, alongside Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong on Monday, said Australia would formally recognise Palestine in the UN next month. Sky News host Chris Kenny said he was 'surprised' Mr Albanese's use of the word 'martyrs' had not gotten more backlash. 'Our government has made it clear that there can be no role for the terrorists of Hamas in any future Palestinian state. This is one of the commitments Australia has sought and received from President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority,' Mr Albanese said. 'The Palestinian Authority has reaffirmed it recognises Israel's right to exist in peace and security. It has committed to demilitarise and to hold general elections. 'It is pledged to abolish the system of payments to the families of prisoners and martyrs.' Speaking to Sky News, Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson said it was an 'appalling mistake, I hope'. 'Of course, that is what the Palestinian Authority calls people who get on school buses and blow themselves to smithereens and take Israeli and Jewish children with them,' Mr Paterson told Kenny on Tuesday. 'No Australian Prime Minister should endorse or use language like that. We should call it for what it is. The Palestinian Authority pays money to the family of terrorists after they kill Israelis. It's one of the many reasons why we should not recognise a Palestinian state.' Senator Paterson said the 'flimsy promise of reform' from Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas should be treated with 'contempt'. Mr Abbas is the Palestinian Authority President, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the leader of radical political party Fatah. Fatah has numerous military arms - including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades which participated in the October 7 attacks in Gaza. Mr Albanese was given assurances about the future of democracy in Palestine, the demilitarisation of the territories and the elimination of Martyr funds by Mr Abbas. The Palestinian Authority operates a so-called 'Martyrs Fund,' which pays monthly stipends to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned for carrying out attacks against Israelis civilians. The longer the prison sentence, the higher the payment - with some families receiving the equivalent of $5,155 per month which have been linked to incentivising terrorism. Textbooks used in Palestinian Authority-run schools have long been condemned by international watchdogs for promoting hatred and glorifying violence. In one instance, a children's book about female suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat - who killed 21 people in a 2003 bombing - was shared by the organisation's South Hebron Directorate of Education.
