Woodhouse Michael: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Woodhouse Michael: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call on the Road User Charges Amendment Bill and in particular on Part 1. Before I do I wonder whether I could address the accusations made by the former member for Otaki in the second reading of this bill about my flights of sycophancy as they related to the Minister. I want to reassure the Committee and the Minister that any compliments I give him are purely merit-based and have absolutely nothing to do with my own personal ambitions in that regard. 
I come back to the select committee’s consideration of this bill. We had some members visit the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in the deliberation. The Committee may be aware that the group included the Hon Mr Barker. He put officials through something of an examination I think we would say around the definitions of a light electric vehicle including why the vehicle had to be plugged into an external power source in order to qualify for the rebate. I think that that was very fair but the reasons for it were given. I am a bit surprised actually that our friends on the other side of the Chamber have not raised a Supplementary Order Paper in this regard. It may have been as a consequence of the honourable member’s cameo appearance in the committee that perhaps they were not able to produce a Supplementary Order Paper of a similarly reasoned nature. 
But we have other external electrical sources like solar power and we also have hybrid vehicles. Of course I was quite interested to know why hybrid vehicles were not included in the exemption from road-user charges in order to encourage the uptake and I was told that there are no diesel hybrids on the market at the moment. So that made perfect sense to me. But I will touch on the point Mr O’Connor made in the second reading debate about diesel which he has addressed again today. In my interjections on him during the second reading debate we were probably at cross purposes. I thought he was talking about diesel hybrids but he—and he has stated it again in his call in the Committee stage—was talking about light diesel vehicles and why they are not being exempted as well. Well that again could have been discussed by way of a Supplementary Order Paper. But the advice I have—and I am very happy to be corrected on this by any other member the Minister or the officials—is that diesel-emitting vehicles do not actually emit much less carbon than petrol vehicles do. I checked that with the good people at the Parliamentary Library. In fact if we excluded them we would need to exclude any light vehicle including petrol vehicles which is probably not a place we want to go. Obviously this legislation is about encouraging the uptake of new technologies and the exemption of light electric vehicles is certainly going to do that. 
I also challenge Mr O’Connor on his quite spurious comments around National’s commitment to climate change and remind him—as he should know—that National was first to propose a carbon tax or a form of emissions trading scheme as far back as 1998. Sadly the electorate did not quite see things the way we did and we were not able to implement that for some time. But I think it is very important to acknowledge that this Government has a very strong commitment to deal with climate change and there will be plenty of other examples of that as we go on. 
I will also touch on Mr Hughes’ comment about the potential for shifting the burden from those exempted from paying road-user charges when they buy light electric vehicles if there is a high number of these vehicles sold. The goal is 300. Would it not be great if we had that sort of problem? But it is also worth bearing in mind that the exemption is time-bound so we will come to 2013 and it will be reviewed. The Greens are rather concerned about the fact that the measure is contained in regulations rather than in primary legislation. I will be interested in their views on that. I notice there is not a Supplementary Order Paper on that which surprises me. I think there were some valid concerns around that. But again it comes down to materiality. If we are worried about the burden being shifted to low-income earners who have low-technology cars but believe only as few as 30 electric vehicles will be purchased we cannot quite argue both sides of the same coin. But I will be interested in what the Greens have to say about that burden and whether it should be in primary legislation. 
I think overall that this is a really sound initiative and one that I think in the future will probably see a much greater number of people taking up electric vehicles than has been the case.