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Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

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Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#211

Post by Retric »

myself248 wrote: post #209
0xB31B1B wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the vast majority of road degredation isn't due to weather, its due to weight wear. As heavy vehicles travel down the road, they create a "ripple" on the road surface in front of the axle. You can create a similar effect if you run your hand across a loose sheet on top of your bed (you will see the wrinkle in the sheet in front if your hand). This bending is the method of road wear that causes like 99% of the mainten…

If that were the case, then roads would be almost equally bad everywhere regardless of the weather. As a Michigander, the dictionary does not contain words to express how strongly I disagree with that implication.

Weather alone does very little. Weather + road ware makes things dramatically worse much faster. You can see this effect with private driveways in the north vs public roads in the south assuming similar construction.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#213

Post by m0zg »

horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

Agreed. Electrics are also substantially heavier, and therefore they cause more road wear, much like light trucks. In the US tax incentives for electrics are also de-facto giving money to the rich. The poor aren't buying electric cars. In some states there's now an upper cut off somewhere around 30K selling price for subsidies, but really, the subsidy needs to be income-based, not price based, and I say this as someone who's firmly upper middle class. It's completely idiotic to subsidize me for buying what amounts to an extreme luxury item.

> 13.1 litres per 100km

This seems crazy high even by US standards. My 300 horsepower 6 cylinder BMW, for example, uses 9.7L per 100km, and I drive mostly in the city.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#214

Post by josephcsible »

octodog wrote: post #195
josephcsible wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: The transition from ICE vehicles to EVs is a very large net benefit to society, so during this period when new ICE vehicles are still legal, we should be giving EVs special ("unfair") benefits to encourage people to switch. If this new tax results in people choosing to buy an ICE vehicle who would have bought an EV without it, that's a very bad outcome. As for the loss of revenue from the gas tax, I think…

Implementing the tax now makes sense because it brings ICE and EV into alignment now, while usage is relatively low, rather than suddenly introducing a tax down the proverbial road. To incentive switching the government has other policy tools at their disposal, such as a one-off subsidy at purchase time.

> it brings ICE and EV into alignment now

I know it does. My point is that bringing them into alignment now isn't a good thing.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#215

Post by mulmen »

sampo wrote: post #205
mulmen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an oversimplification. Rural states receive more in benefits than they pay in federal tax. Large families by necessity are going to favor rural areas and states. It is not clear to me how a large family is a net tax benefit, there are too many other factors to consider. Having more people pay tax does not mean there is a net increase in tax collected.

> It is not clear to me how a large family is a net tax benefit Some of the children from a large rural families will move to cities and make careers that pay lots of taxes. Cities almost always have lower birthrates than countryside.

Yes, we need children. That's not a question. The question is if a single couple needs to produce so many children they drive a vehicle so massive is earns tax breaks.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#216

Post by leetcrew »

oblio wrote: post #200
ElKrist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived both in France and Australia. Australians love 4 wheels drive and bigger cars. In some cases it's justified for obvious reasons: rough environments with less infrastructure (bush, outback..). In other cases it is for softer reasons: a big camping culture, having a big car being a social status, towing your boat/jet ski etc. Also a few other points to consider: _ Australia enjoyed economic growth for a long…

> towing your boat/jet ski etc. A 180-200 BHP sedan can tow a trailer quite easily. You don't need a big SUV for that.

horsepower is rarely the limiting factor for a sedan's towing capacity. a sedan's chassis is only designed to withstand accelerating and stopping its own weight (plus a margin for safety and internal cargo of a reasonable mass). you could probably get away with towing a jetski with a typical sedan, but anything much heavier than that risks bending the chassis. even if a car can tow something without deforming itself, the change in weight distribution can make for a very unsafe situation.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#217

Post by sydneycatalyst »

I think that road users should pay to use the road. Fuel excise, or electricity surcharge tax or whatever, is a tiny fraction of the subsidy that road users get from regular tax payers.

I'm a blind Aussie taxpayer.

Consider my tax situation. If I take an Uber to my local pub, that's about A$10. Of that $10:

$0.90 in Goods and Services Tax $1 to the taxi compensation scheme

That's 19% tax - or $1.90/$10.

In Australia, public transport and P2P services get to a tiny fraction of all available road destinations. It easier (and sometimes cheaper) for someone like me to get from Sydney to Singapore than to Sydney to Kangaroo Valley (about 350km from Sydney).

So, for my 19% tax rate to get to the pub, the equivalent journey someone who can drive a car on their own may pay $0.25 in fuel excise duty.

They can pay the road users tax. They already get enough of a subsidy from me.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#218

Post by AlotOfReading »

lmilcin wrote: post #198
horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

I think you misunderstand what the road tax (or any other tax) is for. There are three main reasons for a tax to exist: 1. To bring revenue 2. To create incentive 3. Social justice (or illusion of it) Revenue from a specific tax is almost never used for a specific purpose. All revenue goes into a large bin from which the government takes to finance everything. Revenue from fuel/road tax is not used to finance buildin…

I'm not sure how it works in your country, but in the US fuel taxes don't go to the general pot, they end up in a specific fund called the Highway Trust Fund that's specifically earmarked for transportation infrastructure and maintenance.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#219

Post by tiew9Vii »

davidivadavid wrote: post #28
horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

As a European, 13.1 l/100 km seems... insane. What's happening here?

Holden/Fords used to manufacture locally. There’s a bunch of not very economical V8’s driving around as similar performant more economical European cars got a 30% luxury car tax to give AU manufacturing incentives.

Now Holden/Ford have shut down here everyone seems to drive a Toyota Hilux / Landcruiser. Tradies get tax benefits buying an expensive Hilux, can use it as a family car as they have dual cab and can take it in the bush doing 4x4. Landcruiser are popular with those who drive in the outback due to being suited to that terrain.

As a lot of cars on the road are Hilux utes the average driver wants a similar sized SUV “as they are safer”

You also have Australia’s lack of commitment to emission policies, manufacturers use Australia to offload cars that don’t meet emission standards elsewhere in the world.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#220

Post by moralsupply »

dragonwriter wrote: post #210
moralsupply wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that taxation is unjustifiable ethically. That includes direct taxation and inflation (under a monopolistic currency dictated by the government). You can only justify taxation under an authoritarian standpoint (eg. "we must tax people so that..."). Going that way, whoever has more guns wins the argument. Making a relative assessment of which taxation scheme is more "fair" seems to be pointless to me, in t…

> My point is that taxation is unjustifiable ethically. That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable. > You can only justify taxation under an authoritarian standpoint (eg. "we must tax people so that...") (1) that's not true, and (2) that's an instrumentalist/utilitarian argument, not an authoritar…

> That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable.

You're right in that there are multiple ethical systems that could justify the arbitrary nature of taxation. That doesn't mean those ethical systems can survive the scrutiny of philosophical razors.

Being specific, from the perspective of the ethics of private property (derived from the concept of self ownership), you can't justify taking away someone's property by force (eg. taxation). You can't fight the self ownership premise without contradicting yourself: if you can argue, it means you are not me, therefore you "own" yourself.

If your ethical system agrees with the idea of taxation "to serve some social benefit" it necessarily doesn't agree with the the premise of self-ownership, as it would imply that "society" has an existence of its own, therefore it can have property, which would extend to the ability of "owning" individuals and their property. However, the "society" is an abstraction, it doesn't really exist (only individuals exist), so that ethical system would fail under Hume's razor.

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