Amateur hour

Written By: - Date published: 10:24 am, March 16th, 2024 - 11 comments
Categories: climate change, energy, labour, national, same old national, simeon brown, transport - Tags:

If ever you needed an example of why urgency and trying to rush things through is a bad thing this week has given a classic example.

As part of Simeon Brown’s vendetta against all things that may actually address climate change he has proposed the charging of road user charges to electric vehicles.

While there is an argument for suspending the preferential treatment of electric vehicles, despite the good they achieve, and instituting charges on their use of the network, Brown wanted to actively punish electric vehicle owners.

As I noted previously Simeon’s axing of the clean car discount saw the sale of electric cars plummet. Previously one in four new cars entering the fleet were electric, one month after the change in policy the figure was one in 26.

And the pending introduction of RUC for electric vehicles saw a further startling statistic appear. If Simeon had his way it would be more far more expensive for an electric car to use the road that it will be for a petrol fuelled car.

From Thomas Coughlan at the Herald:

[I]n what looks like a bad April Fool’s joke, the Green Party has discovered drivers of EVs and plug-in hybrids will be paying more to use the road than people driving fossil fuel cars.

Someone driving a battery EV on a return trip between Wellington and Auckland (presumably with lots of charging stops) will pay $98.80 in RUC and a driver of a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius would pay $94.78, comprised of $72.80 in RUC and $21.98 in petrol taxes.

These figures are more than double what a driver of a Toyota Prius, non-plug-in conventional hybrid would pay for that journey, which would be just $42.92 in petrol taxes.

So the Government introduced under urgency the Road User Charges (Light Electric RUC Vehicles) Amendment Bill. Although there was to be a select committee process the time for lodging submissions was less than two days and the report back was within a week of the bill being read for a first time.

And the inevitable happened. A mistake was made.

From Thomas Coughlan at the Herald:

MPs from the governing parties voted in favour of a Labour amendment in a select committee report, recommending the House reduce a proposed tax rate for hybrid vehicles.

With the bill now back before the House, Labour and the Greens are urging the Government to keep the bill as it is for the sake of the climate.

They might be in luck; Transport Minister Simeon Brown told the Herald he was aware of the report and the accidental change was “something we are open to looking at as a Government”.

The phrase “Keystone Cops” springs to mind. Again from Coughlan:

Labour’s Transport Spokesman Tangi Uitkere said MPs on the committee heard a more appropriate RUC level would be a 50 per cent discount, or $38/1000km. Labour MPs had an amendment drafted to that effect.

They put the amendment to the committee, expecting it to be voted down by the Government majority. Instead, the committee voted it through unanimously, and it now sits in the amended version of the bill the committee has returned to the House.

This is despite the text of the select committee’s report noting that [t]he “majority of us consider that a 30 per cent reduction of the RUC rate effectively accounts for any additional costs in fuel excise duty” – in other words, the text of the report endorses the original bill, but the committee’s proposed changes to the original bill include the reduced RUC rate proposed by Labour.

The chair of the committee, NZ First’s Andy Foster, was informed by the clerk what the committee had voted on and sought leave to have the vote taken again. This was denied.

Chair Andy Foster stated that “[w]e asked to fix it when we realised we got that wrong, [but] Labour denied that”. Clearly he thinks it is Labour’s fault. Of course Labour MPs should have allowed the vote to happen again so that their amendment could be voted down. Can you think of anything more ludicrous?

The report back to Parliament should be interesting. And Simeon Brown may let the amendment go through to try and minimise the embarrassment of the Government.

11 comments on “Amateur hour ”

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  1. Ad 1
    16 March 2024 at 10:50 am

    Sure makes the Skoda Kodiaq hybrid more attractive.

    Looking forward to more small agile wins.

    Well done our team!

  2. Adrian 2
    16 March 2024 at 12:54 pm

    A CoC-up, oh dear God let there be more!

  3. alwyn 3
    16 March 2024 at 2:14 pm

    Perhaps Parliament was a much better place a quarter of a century ago when Pam Corkery was an MP. At that time there was some co-operation between parties so that votes made in error could be corrected rather than, as today, they try and score cheap political points that will have to be fixed in the House.

    Pam tells the tale of the time in Parliament when she was responsible for casting the Alliance votes in the House. On one occasion she got it wrong and voted with the then National Government rather than against it. Murray McCully heard who wrong vote and suggested she might like to reconsider her vote. She then repeated her mistake. He again suggested she reconsider and this time she got it right and voted against McCully's party.

    Pam told the story in her hilarious memoir Pam's Political Confessions. I can't find my old copy so I can't give you a page number.

    I guess things were better in those days when the MPs co-operated rather than try for cheap shots like young children.

    • lprent 3.1
      16 March 2024 at 3:53 pm

      I rather suspect that you are blaming the wrong group. Read the post and quotes carefully. Basically the NZ First MP Andy Foster shouldn't be chair of the select committee

      The chair of the committee, NZ First’s Andy Foster, was informed by the clerk what the committee had voted on and sought leave to have the vote taken again. This was denied.

      The problem here is that the bill had passed from the purview of the select committee, it was now in front of the house waiting for the 2nd reading to be considered by the committee of the whole house.

      From the herald article the next para says why the options for the bill are

      The change means the Government cannot accept in total the committee’s recommendations and the House will have to vote on them one by one, unless they choose to accept the new rate.

      So there is a procedure for dealing with issues from the select committee report – going through it by clause.

      The issue is that government is that they don't want to do that. This isn’t a government that is notable for having any interest in due process. More interested in their optics of dick-waving than putting through well considered legislation. I guess they aren’t interested in having close scrutiny of their decisions.

      Besides Simeon Brown completely screwed up by the numbers (frankly he appears to be incompetent at them) by putting in an grossly excessive RUC for EVs and PHEVs as the first part of the post.

      Certainly the figure appears to have been made without reflection on what was a reasonable RUC based on the principles that the RUC rates are meant to be made on.

      I suspect that he figured out the RUC rate by listening to the ignorant and mindless ranting on the even more numerically illiterate Mike Hosking show.

      But by accident, I think that the select committee may have prevented the court cases that would have arisen out of this poor decision making. Such an inequitable amount was sure to have been the crown lawyers nightmare for the next few years.

    • mickysavage 3.2
      16 March 2024 at 8:52 pm

      Why should Labour MPs fix up the Government's mistakes that will make climate change worse?

    • Hanswurst 3.3
      17 March 2024 at 7:33 pm

      You describe Corkery's voting from opposition on a government bill, so it would seem that McCully was giving her the option of changing her vote on a bill that had the numbers to pass anyway. I wonder whether he would have done the same had he required the Alliance's votes.

    • Darien Fenton 3.4
      18 March 2024 at 7:28 am

      You are mixed up. Pam's account was in the House where the Speaker presides. This was in Select Committee where the governing party has a majority. They stuffed up. Labour opposes the Bill. Simple.

      • lprent 3.4.1
        18 March 2024 at 8:36 am

        It was worse than that.

        The NZ First chair of the select committee wanted to change their report after it had been passed to the house for the second reading.

        The clerk of the house had to inform him that it wasn’t possible because of the rules of the house.

        So of course he blamed Labour… Even a newbie MP should know that wasn’t the case. How did he ever get to be select committee chair?

      • alwyn 3.4.2
        18 March 2024 at 10:01 am

        Your memory may be better than mine. I don't know where my copy of Pam's book went so I wasn't able to check the detail.

        You comment, and some of the others in this stream do prove my point of course. McCully came in immediately and enabled Pam to correct her vote. In this case everyone kept quiet and now gloat about it. He didn't keep quiet. He assisted her to get her vote as she was meant to cast it.

  4. No-Skates 4
    18 March 2024 at 1:45 pm

    Saying "under urgency" is starting to feel redundant under this government.

    • thinker 4.1
      19 March 2024 at 7:07 am

      If Winston wants to make comparisons with dictatorships versus democracies, having the bulk of legislation passed under urgency on a regular basis could be another opportunity.