• Labor renewed its commitment to making access to and ownership of electric vehicles easier at its national conference on Wednesday.
• The party said it will cut tariffs on electric vehicles that are priced below the luxury car tax threshold for fuel-efficient vehicles.
• It comes as industry criticises Australia’s slow uptake of what is now a US $46 billion global industry.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Labor has made renewed commitments to ramp up Australia’s flagging electric vehicle industry, saying it will cut tariffs on electric vehicles worth less than $77,565.

It made the commitments at its national conference on Wednesday, amid criticism from industry that Australia is being left behind as the rest of the world leaps into the EV market.

The commitment would exempt EVs from fringe benefits taxes, potentially resulting in reduced retail prices and more incentives to drive up fleet purchases.

It’s the first time Labor has announced policy around EVs since 2019 when the Morrison government said the party’s car and pollution policies amounted to “a war on the weekend.”

At the time, Labor called for a target of 50% new car sales by 2030 and new pollution regulation on car retailers in line with 105g CO2/km for light vehicles.

Katharine Murphy, political editor at Guardian Australia, wrote that the rhetoric deployed was “part of the Coalition’s efforts to weaponise climate action.”

The tax changes will cost around $200 million in lost revenue over three years, according to reporting by Guardian Australia, and will apply to vehicles that are priced below the luxury car tax threshold for fuel-efficient vehicles.

And senior party figures said this Wednesday’s EV policy is a first instalment rather than the final word on Labor’s renewed focus on improving policy around EVs.

Australia “most hostile environment” for EVs

The managing director of Volkswagen Australia told The Sydney Morning Herald in late March the company would not bring electric vehicles to Australia as a result of current state government restrictions and minimal incentives from the federal government that make the Australian market extremely risky for importers.

Australia is 10-12 years behind the rest of the world’s uptake of electric vehicles, e-mobility fellow at the University of Queensland Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation & School of Civil Engineering, Dr Jake Whitehead told Business Insider Australia.

“If they [the government] were serious about climate change, they’d be serious about the uptake of electric vehicles,” he said of the government’s approach.

And the chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Council Behyad Jafari also told The Sydney Morning Herald that “Australia is easily the most hostile environment for electric vehicles in the world.”

In 2020, electric vehicles made up 0.75% of new car sales in Australia, up from 0.6% in 2019. The growth is sluggish compared with the UK, where sales were up 10.6% – up from 3% the previous year. Sales figures in China are expected to reach about 3.7 million in 2021.

EVs in the news

Reporting, including by Business Insider, claimed on Tuesday that German automaker Volkswagen would rebrand to “Voltswagen” in order to promote its electric cars. However the widely shared news was a n early April Fool’s prank, a Volkswagen spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.