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Mike
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These comments are my own and do not represent the opinions of 2degrees.
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I'm happily surprised that serious analysis of rolling out RUC's to all vehicles is going on behind the scene.
I was very concerned that the "starting with EV's" bit of EV's was going to be completed, and the rest of the RUC roll out quietly dropped.
Given we haven't set a special EV RUC rate at an equal to the road tax paid by an efficient hybrid, it is vital this this happens ASAP.
The underlying issue here is that (petrol) cars have got dramatically more efficient over the last few decades, which must be seriously eating into the tax take to cover land transport.
Slapping 7.6c/km RUC onto every petrol car (and removing petrol tax) is the quick fix, but it not going to be politically easy. Taxi drivers are going to scream blue murder that they did the right thing by buying hybrids and now are getting hit with double the road tax...
Plus all the issues that have been discussed over the last 67 pages...
MikeAqua:
HarmLessSolutions:
[...without the] added taxation on petrol to disincentivise high consumption.
Sounds inflationary. The amount of freight moved in this country without the use of fossil fuels is 3/8 of a gnat's nut hair. Making vehicles more expensive to turn makes everything more expensive.
The price of petrol without RUC will still be high enough to disincentivise consumption.
Alternately RUC could be split into more weight classes, with the lighter classes (and hybrids) being cheaper. That would generally incentivize more economic vehicles, without being inflationary.
On Fright, 99%+ is moved with diesel / Jet A1, so is not subject to petrol tax currently.
On inflationary pressure:
It is really up to the government id they want to roll out the current 7.6c / km RUC rate to all vehicles, or if they want to tweak this rate to be fiscally neutral with the removal of gas tax.
Should note that there is quite a bit of general tax & rates that goes into road's, so there is a fairly strong argument for increasing road taxes.
It's a fair point that current petrol tax acts as a fairly strong incentive for more efficient petrol vehicles. Small changes have big impacts at the margin's, hence why we bother with stuff like the ETS. V8 owners will rejoice if this change goes through, as their total running costs will go down.
Of course v8's arn't that common anymore, and the current road tax system has pushed most high emissions vehicles (utes, larger vans & larger off road SUV's) to diesel fuel anyway.
More weight classes for RUC's has been discussed to death on here.
Short answer is that light vehicles do negligible road damage (it basically all comes from heavy vehicles), so their RUC fee is basically just to pay for the provision of roads, and the space they use on them). Trying to add an emissions component into the RUC system, would break it's fundamental purpose of being a charge for using the road's (not for emissions which is already handled by the ETS component in fossil fuel retail prices).
Road damage is an exponential scale of axle load, so even if we did do a say sub 2500kG GVM bad, it would likely be say 7.4c / km , instead of 7.6c/km. I.e. not enough to bother with adding another weight band
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HarmLessSolutions:
The situation where the most economic hybrid is charged the same rate per kilometre with petrol being reduced by the National Land Transport Fund cost of ~80c/L (incl. GST) seems like a reduction in disincentive for high consumption vehicles compared to current fuel pricing.
Keep in mind that a blanket RUC rate across all <3.5T vehicles is unlikely to change and is likely to be a net sum loss exercise so far as road maintenance purposes are concerned. Heavy vehicle RUC rates are a whole different discussion.
Also the current situation is essentially penalising to EVs as today's emission target announcement is alluding to and the government has now put itself in a corner and to be fair and emissions conscious should now be addressing that inequity by raising taxation of ICEs.
Yes it absolutely is a reduced disincentive against high consumption petrol vehicles.
But an argument can be made that the current disincentive is unfair, and we should just treat all emissions the same under the ETS. Currently inherently unfair that the driver of a thirsty petrol V8 car pays far more in taxes, than a person driving a comparably thirsty V8 Diesel SUV. (or a person creating those emissions off road, for example a person who creates the same emissions with outdoor gas heaters and those cool looking gas torches.
I feel that the the government will have a net gain in income by moving all vehicles to RUC's.
Below graph shows the CO2 emissions of light vehicles entering the NZ fleet up until 2018. Break even point between RUC & petrol tax is around 9L/100km (210g co2/km). Got to go back to before 2008 to have average petrol cars using more fuel than that.
https://www.transport.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Report/The-NZ-Vehicle-Fleet-Report-2018-web-v2.pdf
Of course there is the difference between ratings and real world fuel usage, and off road usage of petrol in applications that can't claim rebates, such as residential lawnmowers, recreational boating etc.
Wish there was better data of current actual fuel consumption.
Assume you are referring to this:
https://environment.govt.nz/news/erp2/
In terms of emissions, we have the ETS, (a cap and trade system) We can achieve any level of emissions we want with this (assuming we don't exclude major emitters from it). Really any effort into reducing vehicle emissions, just means that emissions can be cheaper for other sectors under the and trade system.
My take is that this is good, swapping out a Camry for a Camry hybrid or Tesla model 3, doesn't really have any impact on quality of life of income of the country (and is good for stuff like balance of trade), but relying on the ETS, hitting all sectors is going to have a real impact on NZ's standard of living. Has a very real risk of cursing the dairy industry which is the main reason we are a fairly wealthy country (something I like very much).
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PolicyGuy:
It's going to be interesting to see how they're going to treat motorcycles, scooters and motorised tricycles. They pay through the fuel levy a.t.m., so giving them a free ride from RUCs seems inequitable, but ...
Under current legislation, they would be required to pay. No distinction on weight or number of wheels for non electric light vehicles (except sub 300W e-bikes and e-scooters which are declared not to be motor vehicles)
https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2012/0001/latest/whole.html#DLM3394838
So if you brought a diesel motorbike you would need to pay is my understanding.
However for some reason we decided to exclude light electric motorbikes. Came very late in the piece, I can't recall reasons ever being shared.
I would have supported it if it was a temporary exemption to encourage update, but in this case it is a permanent, 100% exemption which seems as you say inequitable.
HarmLessSolutions:
Considering their negligible effect on roads and miniscule road footprint are they even relevant in this perspective? Motorcycles already get stung hugely in terms of registration charges so is it really necessary to recoup what is a tiny cost recovery item.
All light vehicles have a negligible effect on roads, and at typical traveling speed, motorcycles footprint on the roads (including the full lane width and following distance), is roughly the same as that of a car...
Rego is mostly ACC, I don't think this can be used as a justification to exempt from unrelated road user charges.
If we don't tax motorcycles for their use of the road's, this would be a strong tax incentive vs other vehicle types. Can't really see anything to justify that at the moment.
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