Gas-Guzzling SUVs Become Election Battleground in Australia
Gas-Guzzling SUVs Become Election Battleground in Australia
(Bloomberg) -- Faced with an uphill battle to retain power in next month’s elections, Australia’s prime minister has found a new rallying cry: a pledge to protect drivers of gas-guzzling SUVs from a global push to switch to battery-powered electric vehicles.
It’s already set Scott Morrison at odds with a global investor group, a vocal technology billionaire and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk.
Morrison is attacking the main opposition’s Labor Party’s proposal to boost adoption of EVs, saying it’s an assault on motorists’ freedoms and love of vehicles that have some “grunt.”
“You should be able to have your choice about the sort of vehicle you want to drive, that you want to get around in on the weekend, if you want to put the under-6’s soccer team in the back of your SUV,” Morrison said Tuesday in the town of Gosford, about 90 minutes north of Sydney.
Labor, which is leading in opinion polls and favorite to win the election, wants to accelerate Australia’s sluggish shift away from combustion-engine vehicles. Leader Bill Shorten is aiming for half of new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030 -- compared to just 0.2 percent in 2017, BloombergNEF data shows. The opposition also plans to strengthen vehicle emissions standards, which currently trail the U.S.
Morrison, whose Liberal-National coalition is seeking a third term in office, says that could see SUVs and utes, vehicles popular with tradespeople, being “ultimately outlawed” -- a claim he hasn’t backed up.
The sharp differences between Labor and the governing coalition on how to tackle climate change are shaping up as a key issue for voters frustrated at a decade of political dithering and policy missteps that have left them with spiraling power bills.
Morrison has dropped plans to legislate the Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon emissions, and is considering subsidizing a new coal-fired power plant to lower the cost of energy for consumers. Labor is advocating more ambitious emissions targets and wants to tighten standards imposed on the worst industrial polluters.
The “completely ridiculous” spat between political leaders over electric vehicles underscores the challenge for investors from Australia’s chaotic policy on energy and climate change, according to Fiona Reynolds, chief executive officer of Principles for Responsible Investment.
“This whole thing about ‘you won’t be able to drive your ute on the weekend’ rather than thinking about the economic benefits that could come from a new industry, seems very small-minded,” Reynolds, whose group lobbies on behalf of fund mangers including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and Vanguard Group Inc., said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview.
Australia also risks losing out on opportunities from the global shift to EVs to potentially revive its defunct car industry, create new jobs and better exploit the country’s abundance of raw materials needed in vehicle batteries, she said.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire co-founder of enterprise software company Atlassian Corp. and an advocate of renewable energy, has taken to Twitter to condemn the government’s lack of support for EVs.
His flurry of posts on the issue drew a response from fellow billionaire Musk, who Cannon-Brookes famously challenged in 2017 to install a giant battery in South Australia to solve an energy crisis.
Responding to Cannon-Brookes on Twitter, Musk pointed to Norway’s new passenger vehicle sales, which hit a 50 percent rate for EVs in the first two months of 2019, and argued there’s “no question” Australia could achieve the same well inside the Labor party’s target.
--With assistance from James Thornhill.
To contact the reporters on this story: David Stringer in Melbourne at dstringer3@bloomberg.net;Matthew Burgess in Sydney at mburgess46@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alexander Kwiatkowski at akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net, Edward Johnson, Peter Vercoe
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.