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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Australia already isn’t on track to meet its emissions targets, just one year after setting them.

It’s alarming news, and part of the reason for it is that emissions on our roads are going up.

So, why is that happening, and how harmful are our cars for the environment compared to the rest of the world?

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on Australia’s love affair with big, dirty cars.

It’s Wednesday, September 6.

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ANGE:

Mike, you've been looking at how Australia is going with its climate change targets and how the cars that Australians drive are impacting that. What do we know about the cars on our roads and the choices around the types of cars we buy?

MIKE:

Well, the thing about Australians is that we love big cars and big utes, you know. So while we might be making advances in other areas of meeting our climate targets, when it comes to cars we're living in another century. We're a nation of gas guzzlers and we're actually getting worse. I mean, we're now buying more big cars than we were a decade ago. Now, I don't know if you're a football fan, but I am.
And I watch the rugby league

Audio excerpt – NRL commentator:

“Hynes, team on the front foot…”

MIKE:

And when a trier scores in the rugby league, the presenters immediately say, let's see that again on the Isuzu D-max replay.

Audio excerpt – NRL commentator:

“Isuzu D-max reply. Hynes steps up…”

MIKE:

Now the Isuzu D-max is a diesel ute and an Isuzu D-max emits about 212 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilometre it drives. And that's a lot. Worse than that, during the breaks in play, you know, when you get the ads, they're advertising something even bigger and more polluting, which is an American behemoth called the Ram.

Audio excerpt – Ram ad:

“The New Ram 1500 Express Crew cab is big on space, has a powerful V8 Hemi, and up to four and a half ton towing. The RAM 1500 is unrivalled in every way. That's why our range of pick up trucks eats utes for breakfast.”

MIKE:

And Ram's pump out 283 grams per kilometre. So to put this into a bit of context, the average new European car emits about 108 grams per kilometre, so about one third of a Ram or about half of an Isuzu or Hilux. So that gives you some idea of how far behind the international game we are. In terms of what we're buying. Australians love to buy commercial vehicles, utes, for example, and then to use them as passenger cars. So once you start looking at how many utes are on the road in our cities, it becomes obvious. We have way more utes than we actually have tradies, you know, so we're not buying them for their primary purpose. We're buying them to shuffle the kids off to school or to tow the boat at the weekend or something like that. So, you know, something like 25% of our total vehicle sales now are light commercial vehicles, and the vast majority of these, I might add, have diesel engines, which, you know, are particularly dirty. And of course, then there's the SUVs. Just over 50% of new car sales now are SUVs, which is remarkable when you think we live in a country where the vast majority of the population lives in pretty densely populated cities, where you'd think a small sedan would be the most appropriate thing to get around in. But small sedans aren't the most popular car by a long way. They’re now only 17% of new car sales. So, you know, we've got a big problem here.

ANGE:

Yeah, right. And so why do we have this huge uptake of big cars and commercial vehicles in Australia?

MIKE:

Well, interestingly, one of the reasons goes back to the previous government during the COVID pandemic, when they were trying to stimulate the economy.

Audio excerpt – Frydenburg:

“Over 99% of businesses employing over 11 million workers can write off the full value of any eligible asset that they purchase.”

MIKE:

So back in 2020, as a government stimulus measure, the Morrison government came up with the idea of essentially funding people to buy more big cars.

Audio excerpt – Frydenburg:

“Announcing the extension of these measures for a further year until the 30th of June 2023. So a tradie can buy a new ute, a farmer, a new harvester and a manufacturer expand their production line.”

MIKE:

It allowed small business owners to claim an instant asset write off when they bought assets worth up to $150,000. And of course, you know, what can you do when you're someone's offering you that kind of thing? Well, you go out and buy yourself a big new car. And that's exactly what Australians did.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“Australians are driving record car sales across the country. A new vehicle was delivered every 29 seconds last year. More than one in five of those with a Toyota. And bigger is proving better, with utes and SUVs dominating demand.”

MIKE:

And of course, the Morrison government's hostility to, well to all forms of climate action was well known. You know, the coal coddling and all the rest of it. But during their 2019 campaign, they made a particular point of campaigning against electric vehicles.

Audio excerpt – Morrison:

"The cheapest car you can currently buy as an electric vehicle presently is about 45 to $50000 a year. That's the cheapest car Bill Shorten wants to make available to you to buy.

MIKE:

They said that Labour was coming for the weekend. You know, they were going to take your utes off you and force you to have an electric vehicle.

Audio excerpt – Morrison:

“And I'll tell you what, it's not going to tow your trailer, it's not going to tow your boat, it's not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family. Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles.”

MIKE:

Which of course was absolutely untrue, but probably, I would suggest, somewhat effective.

Audio excerpt – Morrison:

“Where you've got Australians who love being out there in their four wheel drives. He wants to say, see you later to the SUV.”

MIKE:

What's interesting about this problem is that it comes back to this decision that had nothing whatsoever to do with climate change at all. You know, it was a short sighted measure to try and boost the economy.

ANGE:

Yeah. And has that policy decision made our roads much dirtier compared to the rest of the world? I guess I'm wondering how unusual this is. You know, are our cars particularly big and dirty?

MIKE:

Well, particularly big and dirty. And while the Morrison government has had some blame to accept on this, they were heading in that direction anyway. Compared with the rest of the world, cars in Australia use about 40% more fuel than those in the European Union on average. And we're falling ever further behind because the Europeans are getting cleaner all the time. The average emissions of new cars in Europe declined by more than 5% last year. So you might say, well, a lot of Europeans like tiny little city cars, which is true. But you know, they also have big mercs and beamers and Audi and the rest. You might also say that we drive big distances down here and so we need bigger cars. So of course we use more fuel. But then, why do we use 20% more fuel than the United States per capita? You know, it's a country with big cars and big distances like us. So the answer to this, there's a number. I mentioned Morrison. Another one is that we have no fuel efficiency standards. Everywhere else in the world, everywhere else in the developed world, has fuel efficiency standards imposed on their cars, except for two places, Russia and Australia. And what fuel efficiency standards do is they require carmakers, or their local suppliers, to improve the average fuel efficiency of their new cars over time. I'm pleased to say the Albanese Government has promised to implement these standards, but it hasn't yet. Hopefully it might by the end of the year. The question then becomes just how stringent they will be. When we're talking about things like emissions. You know, we really don't have time to waste.

These fuel inefficient cars are not only contributing to worsening the climate change disaster now, but with every month that goes past, they make the task of achieving our emissions target harder. In June last year, in order to achieve the promised 43% reduction by 2030, Australia would have had to reduce its emissions by 7.3 million tonnes every three months. Now, to stay on track, we have to cut by 8.6 million tonnes every three months. So you know, the task is getting harder, and our attachment to giant cars is one of the things that's making it harder.

ANGE:

Coming up after the break, how our obsession with big cars is jeopardising our climate targets.

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ANGE:

So, Mike, it's going to be a very hard task to reduce our emissions in Australia by 43% by 2030. How much is that actually to do with the cars on our roads?

MIKE:

Well, the Government released a new report into how we were going with emissions of greenhouse gases last week. And basically what it found was that our carbon emissions, which should be going down, of course, had actually gone up by almost 1% in the past year. So, that 43% reduction target is getting further away, or we've got further away in the past year. And road transport emissions were a substantial part of it. The base year for making all these calculations is 2005. So the idea is that we compare what we were emitting in 2005 with what we intend to emit in 2030. And, apart from a pretty steep decline during the COVID period, where, of course, no one was flying, no one was driving, our transport emissions have been just steadily going up for that entire period. So it's not good, I guess. Particularly when this is a sector of emissions where we already have a solution, right? We have electric vehicles, we could buy smaller cars, there are readily available alternate… you know, we could ride our bicycles, we could catch public transport. There are readily available alternatives. And the thing about these cars, of course, is that they last a long time. So, you know, you've got to think about where we might be a decade or so from now, because the average car in Australia last ten or 20 years. So those decisions that were made on the basis of Morrison stimulus three years ago, those cars are still going to be on the road a decade or more from now. So that locks us into those emissions for years to come. So yeah, today's car purchase is 2030’s climate headache, I guess you would say.

ANGE:

Yeah. And Mike, when you think back to how government policy made this problem worse, that policy decision by Scott Morrison, it ended up having this significant climate impact despite being an economic stimulus package. Do we need a way to check that that doesn't happen again in the future? Should all policies, not just gas projects or coal mines, have to be assessed for the impact they could have on the climate?

MIKE:

Well, of course they should. I might say a lot of other countries looking at this and being a lot more ambitious than we are. You know, I already mentioned that most of them have fuel efficiency standards. But the other thing is dozens of, literally dozens of countries, almost every country in Europe, I think China, Canada, a lot of the states in the United States, even, you know, little countries in Latin America that you wouldn't think, think of have set deadlines after which the sale of new fossil powered vehicles will be banned. In the most cases, they're looking somewhere between 2035 to 2040 to stop the sales of new internal combustion engines. So that's something we could look at, we haven't done that. So certainly we could be doing something about that and certainly we could be doing a lot more to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles, you know, and discourage gas guzzlers.

ANGE:

And Mike, it's pretty alarming to hear we're not reaching our climate targets. We’re already failing towards that goal. Do you think our goals were too ambitious or was it just that our policy hasn't been strong enough?

MIKE:

Our goal certainly weren't too ambitious. I mean, if you listen to the experts, they say 43% wasn't strong enough, we should be looking at 50 or 60 or more. We should be getting the bulk of our emissions reduction task happening between now and 2030 or 2035, if we're ever going to hit net zero by 2050. So we're facing a daunting task. We’re already falling behind our 2030 targets and pretty soon we’ll have to come up with some new targets for 2035, because the fact that we’ve signed on to the Paris agreement requires that. So really the stakes in this couldn’t be higher, there’s really no such thing as being too ambitious when you’re talking about our future. I'm pleased to say the Albanese government has dumped the Morrison instant asset write off policy, so that's a good thing. But going to, you know, what you might call social licence, I think we are starting to see the start of a shift in public attitudes. This year so far, electric vehicle sales are about 8.4% of all new vehicles sold. Now I know that doesn't sound like much, but that's twice as many as was the case last year, which in turn was twice as many as the year before. So it's quadrupled in a couple of years. And of course, they're getting cheaper all the time. And EVs, for want of a better term, you know, increasingly cool. I was talking to Amanda Mackenzie, who's the CEO of the Climate Council, and she pointed out the success of the anti-smoking lobby in stopping tobacco sponsorships of sporting teams. Her organisation has been campaigning, with some success, for a while now, to stop sports teams accepting sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. And when you think about it, these big gas guzzlers are really just an extension of the fossil fuel industry. I don't believe that her people have started campaigning specifically against car ads yet, but I think it's only a matter of time before something like that happens. And I think that, actually, we are seeing the start of a chipping away at the social licence of big vehicles.

ANGE:

So do you think we could, you know, if that image of gas guzzling cars gets inverted, would we start to see a Tesla touchdown sponsorship of the NRL or something?

MIKE:

Well it would be nice to see, wouldn’t it? A Tesla touchdown… that's splendidly alliterative. I think you should ring the… should ring the NRL immediately and suggest it to them.

ANGE:

I'll copyright that one. Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MIKE:

My pleasure.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

The CEO of Qantas Alan Joyce is retiring today.

Joyce was set to end his 15-year run as chief executive in November, but announced he would depart early after a damaging week of news reports for the airline, so that Qantas can, quote "accelerate its renewal".

And,

Yesterday, outgoing governor of the reserve bank Philip Lowe announced interest rates will be left on hold.

It’s the final rates decision Lowe oversees at the RBA before he is replaced by the new governor, Michelle Bullock.

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