Bill Shorten on Australia’s EV policy

Say what you like about Bill Shorten – and the Australian public had a few choice words for him at the last election – but he is at least principled enough to put your money where his mouth is.

That’s right, the man who may have lost the last election because Scott Morrison accused him of wanting to murder the Australian weekend by forcing us all into electric vehicles, is now driving a Tesla Model 3.

Shorten, whose every utterance seems to be a sharpened soundbite spat through a blowpipe at Morrison’s neck, says that makes him the first and only of our 226 MPs to choose an EV as his Commonwealth-supplied vehicle (“It wasn’t on the list of approved cars for MPs so I had to apply for permission – I know the Morrison government specialises in doing things slowly, but it really took a while”).

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His Tesla – which he says he fell in love with instantly after arranging a test drive – is the $59,900 Model 3 Standard Plus, which is leased for him.

The Tesla is not just a car for Shorten, of course, it’s a very attractive mobile soapbox that allows him to shout, with great passion, about the many ways that the government is turning us into “an automotive third-world country”.

His argument is that we have not done enough to incentivise, or even encourage, consumers to buy EVs, and nor have we made that choice look palatable by providing the necessary charging infrastructure.

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Labor points out that if you live in the UK, you can currently choose from more than 130 different EV models, but we have just 31 on offer, and fewer than half of those are priced under $65,000. (One in 10 British folks buying a new car goes electric; in Australia we’re at less than one percent.) The electric revolution is coming, but Shorten believes we’re going to be left in the slow lane.

“It’s like we’re having an argument between landlines and mobile phones when we have this argument between combustion engines and electric vehicles,” he says.

“It’s funny, the Morrison government wants to make us globally leading edge in submarine technology, at a cost of $100 billion, but it gets in the way of Australians getting access to economical and environmentally sustainable cars.

“I do believe that electric cars are part of our future. I took policies which I didn’t think were radical to the last election, but they were lampooned by elements of the right-wing media and the Prime Minister as ‘the death of the weekend’.

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“It’s just a case of poor national leadership, I outlined a plan for EVs, and the government rubbished it and misled people.

“I think Morrison is learning the hard lesson of life, that you can lie to people once but you’re very unlikely to get a second chance. And the simple fact is that he did lie and exaggerate about electric vehicles.”

The failure of Australian authorities to implement the EV policies he took to the last election riles Shorten all the more because US President Joe Biden has been happy to borrow them. The US is aiming for half of all cars and ‘light trucks’ sold in 2030 so be zero-emission vehicles.

“I announced our policy in March of 2019, and Biden announced his in the second quarter of 2021, so we could have been two years ahead of the Yanks,” he groans.

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“All I proposed was to put policies in place to see half of all our new-car sales be EVs by 2030, so we could have been much further along that road.

“The world doesn’t wait for Australia, so every time we make a decision to stand still we drop further back, and it becomes harder to claw back again.

“I think also we need to have the conversation about what we can build here. I think electric vehicles offer us the chance to do more manufacturing here. I was a big fan of the Australian car industry, but it’s gone now, so the question is, what can we add into the global supply chain of vehicles?”

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What amazes him is how often strangers approach him, not to talk about the last election or how much they hate Scott Morrison, but to ask about his Model 3.

“I’m genuinely surprised how many people want to talk about the Tesla and ask about EVs and there’s been a lot of bad press about them – range anxiety, cost, charging – but I think there’s a tremendous level of interest in them from Australians,” he insists.

“The base model Tesla is not a luxury car on price, it’s about the same price as the SUVs which many of my colleagues drive, and when you deduct the cost of the petrol, and the maintenance, this is quite good value for the tax payer. But while we remain an automotive backwater, cheaper EVs available elsewhere just aren’t coming here.”

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Interestingly, Shorten doesn’t come out in favour of financial incentives to encourage Australians to buy EVs. He thinks what governments need to do is provide the infrastructure that’s missing so people know they’ll be able to recharge. Beyond that, he says he didn’t realise just how economically beneficial the Tesla would be until he lived with it, “so really it’s just an awareness and education thing.”

“I think the value is there, and once people realise what they’re going to save on their petrol bills, I think that’s a pretty good incentive,” he adds.

And with that, he’s off in his beloved Tesla, pausing only to remind us, again, that “I’m the first politician to really practice what I preach.”

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Banked!

Shorten’s office has calculated that it’s saving him, and thus us, $3840 in fuel bills a year (the car costs $58 a month to charge; his previous vehicle, a Mazda CX-9, was using $378 of fuel per month).

Child’s play

Shorten says his three kids had never taken any interest at all in his previous work vehicles, but they love the Tesla, with its fart sounds, giant screen and minimalist interior, “possibly even more than I do”.

Road tax?

As to the Victorian state government’s world-first road tax on EV owners and whether it could be seen as discouragement to consumers, Shorten is too clever to start criticising a state Labor government’s policies: “Oh well, I’ve never wanted to be premier of Victoria or premier of a state, so I’ll let that one pass,” he says.