I was surprised to read this one in the Herald this morning, where the Government is considering a levy on all car imports coming into New Zealand, based on their CO2 emissions. According to National’s finance spokesman Bill English, this could add $10,000 to a Holden Commodore based on $150 per gram of CO2 emitted per kilometre travelled, above the standard of 214g CO2/km.
Sound like more revenue gathering to you? It does to me. They want levy’s on our petrol, they are going to build PPP toll roads (as long as there are alternatives I don’t have a problem with this one) and as always are very innovative in taking back any income tax reductions that they offer us in other ways.
If they do this, have no doubt that this will affect you, just as their engineering of interest rates has affected the whole economy and is driving some people out of their homes. The thing is that people are already straining the public transport systems a increased fuel costs bite into their home budgets forcing them to leave their cars at home.
Yesterday, on my way back from visiting some car manufacturers (ironically), I had to turn off my air vents because a bus was blowing great plumes of smelly diesel smoke right into my car’s air con system. A little further on the motorway I got stuck behind one of those Japanese import refrigerated trucks that was likewise blowing exhaust soot at me. The back of the truck was almost black from soot that has come out of its exhaust. I’m not sure I’d be keen to buy the food he was transporting.
So here’s the thing. Instead of taxing vehicles as they come into the country and penalise everyone indiscriminately (and yes I do understand that CO2 is not the same as the soot smoke I was complaining about), why not tax all cars at the time of Warrant of Fitness testing for the percentage of pollutants they have control over. Make the owners of smoky, sooty, poorly tuned cars pay the levy, or just like any other warrant failure, go back to the garage, get their car correctly tuned and go back for another try.
It seem to me that, because many countries already have stringent motor vehicle emission standards, the quality of the exhaust output on new cars is going to continuosly improve. It’s the cars, vans, trucks and buses that we have here already that are the problem and if we cause enough pain for those vehicles to be tuned up, a lot of the problems will go away.
The Government is very keen on users pay, so make the real polluters pay, not just a blanket levy on every vehicle that comes into our country. It’s very simple really. It’s transparent and the Government will not be opening themselves up to complaints of revenue gathering. It would be far more consistent with their user pay policies and their claims that they want to reduce pollution by bringing in these levy’s.
As a footnote, a question for someone. Do the bus companies have their own testing station and produce their own Warrants of Fitness? How is it that there are so many smelly buses on the road puffing great clouds of black smoke at pedestrians and cars behind them. Why do people have to hold their breath as these buses go past. How do they get away with it?
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