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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/10/as-nsw-roads-minister-i-know-we-have-to-incentivise-electric-cars>
"In the days since the ‘“black summer” bushfires I have watched my community
suffer. That moment in our history was a major climatic event and the largest
wildfires our nation has ever seen.
We can’t spend any more time, or expend any more energy, debating climate
change. We need to take action now. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s real or
not – regardless of your viewpoint, you will be a beneficiary of the
innovation.
An immediate way we can lead change is to increase the number of electric
vehicles on our roads.
What we have seen in Australia is too much concern around losing tax revenue.
There is a belief that as we scale up our electric vehicle market, we will see
the dollars coming in from the fuel excise scale down.
But we need to encourage, not discourage, change for the better. We need
visionary thinking to deal with this issue. We need to incentivise the market.
We need to see a variation in price points – the notion of electric vehicles as
being only for the wealthy must be dispelled – and importantly, we need to do
this here and now.
I travelled to Oslo a few years ago to have a look at what is happening with
electric vehicles there. They are so much further down the track – they even
have electric excavators and ferries. Meanwhile, in Australia we’re still
focused on an outdated approach. We are worrying about tax when we should be
worrying about how we can speed up the electrification process. It makes me
nervous that we are stuck having a debate around revenue. We have got to think
differently."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
