Once more the motor industry and the motorist are being targeted, and in the rush-to-legislate manner that has become so much a feature of the Labour-led coalition government.
The latest is a bid to add another tax (remember the election promise that there would be no new taxes during the first term, yet petrol has already received additional taxation – twice if you live in Auckland), this time to those vehicles which are heavier on fuel, with an offset that income derived will be used to encourage the use of electric vehicles and those vehicles which are lighter on fuel, such as hybrids, plug-in electrics, and small cars.
The fact that most of the vehicles targeted for the extra taxation will be utes, for which there is no alternative for business or farm use, seems to have been ignored, and as usual the knock-on effect of adding taxes of as much as $8,000 per vehicle on productivity and the cost of doing business has been totally disregarded.
On top of that there’s the confusion about the safety of second-hand vehicles as I outlined last issue, and some of the vehicles the NZTA wants to outlaw, using information derived mainly from Australian crashes, will be the very vehicles the government wants to encourage and throw incentives at!
While on the face of it I concede that there is some merit in the proposals, they do need a lot more work before they are rushed into law. The world is not going to collapse if we wait another month or two, and we certainly don’t want a situation like that which has happened with the rushed gun laws, where confusion reigns, and even the minister in charge and the PM don’t know what is going on!
As always, the devil is in the detail, and if the Government would just step back a bit instead of rushing into things like children who have been given the key to a toy shop, a workable proposal could come out of it which would meet the requirements of cutting down on emissions while allowing Kiwis to carry on business as usual.