Tax: a politician’s addiction – always eager to take your money and never satisfied. Now, our politically correct federal government have floated the idea that you can no longer choose what car you want to drive. It must be electric, or you can pay a truckload of tax for an internal combustion engine. This will hamstring many of our road users, especially our truckers and our tradies – workers who need larger cars to carry heavy loads.

But the politically correct elites who want us to drive only electric cars have missed an important detail. Producing an electric car creates more CO2 emissions than producing one with an internal combustion engine. It can take up to 10 years of driving that piston engine for that car to emit more CO2 than the electric car.

The greenie, tax loving, PC drones forget that lithium – the key metal in a battery, is a rare earth metal. It requires vast amounts of energy to extract from the ground, more than even iron ore. A battery can also only hold a charge for so long before it requires replacement. The average early 2000s Commodore would get more than 500,000 kilometres on the clock before the engine would need to be replaced. I struggle to see a Tesla battery cell delivering that sort of lifespan.

These people have also forgotten about alternative fuel blends. Petrol is on its way out. Why? Because better blends are being produced – E10 and E85 (10 per cent ethanol and 85 per cent ethanol). The V8 supercars have used E85 for a few years now. It provides a better burn, fewer emissions, is cheaper, and is made from grain.

Simply put, the free market has done its thing by producing a better fuel and people are responding already. Yet all the ruling elite can do is think that everyone must drive a Tesla. If you don’t, you must be taxed.

This leads to another one of the government’s fallacies – a majority of power stations in Australia burn fossil fuels. You are charging your Tesla with fossil fuels. This means that it is anything but carbon neutral.

The reality is clear. The concept of this car emissions tax is not to reduce emissions, but yet another wholesale cash grab. If the government really cared about car emissions, they would have helped Holden develop their E85 engine over half a decade ago.

Government has found another creative excuse to dip into our pockets. Is anyone even surprised anymore?

James Penny studies law at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne 

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