Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Does the Government have the political courage to scrap the Clean Car Standard?

So the latest climate drama involving this Government is that they’re being accused of lining up to scrap the Clean Car Standards altogether.

And I would say to the EV lobby group pushing this line that they may want to just settle down. Even those of us -and I’m looking straight at myself here - who want to see the standards dropped altogether do not think it’s going to happen. That would take political courage and I do not think this Government has that on a subject like this in an election year.

Now, what I’m talking about, if you don’t follow all of the details, is the twin of the ute tax. This is the other part of that policy that was brought in at the same time.

It’s a penalty that importers have to pay for every dirty car they bring into the country, in the hope that it will encourage them to instead go for the cleaner cars - the EVs. It was recently dropped right down at the end of the year and it’s now up for consultation. The Government is considering overhauling the system.

One of the questions being asked in the consultation is whether it should just be abolished altogether. Now I’d love it to be because it hasn’t worked. Consumers simply do not want to buy that many EVs in this country. The only thing this standard has done is reduce the number of Japanese cars - which we love - coming into the country in the past five years, from 150,000 a year to 90,000 a year.

That’s down 45 percent and apparently most of this, according to dealers, is because of the Clean Car Standard.
And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that does to prices.

If you’re bringing in so many fewer cars, what happens to prices? That’s right - they go up. And who pays that? That’s right - you and I. I don’t love that. The other thing it’s done is force 244 dealers - just last year - to shut down because they couldn’t get enough cars.

So I’d love to see the standard scrapped. It’s only making our cars more expensive, it’s only putting people out of business, and as we know, it’s going to do nothing for the climate because New Zealand is insignificant in the scheme of global emissions.

But it will not be scrapped because every other developed nation apart from Russia is applying standards like this, so we’ll be stuck playing the game too.

“Should it be abolished?” is, I’m sorry to say, just a question to make the Government look like it’s considering everything - but it is not actually considering everything, and we’re probably stuck with this.

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