In 2021 the government introduced the clean car discount, making dity ute buyers pay to subsidise cleaner cars. The policy has been wildly successful - so successful Labour wants to kill it to save money. How successful? Take a look at the vehicle fleet statistics:
[CC-BY-SA 4.0 Ministry of transport. Source: vehicle fleet statistics, registrations by CO2 emissions]
The initial phase of the clean car discount boosted EVs, and that effect has only got stronger. But the second phase, which started charging dirty vehicles, has had a huge impact, roughly doubling the proportion of such vehicles from 20% to 40%. And this is going to have a huge long-term impact on emissions, because kiwis keep their cars for a long time. The average age of a car in Aotearoa is 15 years, so this is going to drive the lifetime emissions of the fleet downwards.
Which makes Labour's austerity-driven push to kneecap the scheme even harder to understand. Oh no! We might be improving things faster than climate-change-denying Treasury thinks we need to! We could be dropping transport emissions - and saving money - faster than expected! The horror!
For fuck's sake, can't Labour just accept success and take the win?
