Rego rebate plan to reward small-car owners
By Tim Dick, Urban Affairs Reporter
Registration fees will be reduced for cars with small engines and increased for those with large ones, including most four-wheel-drives, if the State Government adopts recommendations to reduce greenhouse gases.
Members of the Greenhouse Advisory Panel support the idea as part of a strategy to reduce vehicle emissions.
Private car owners pay between $200 and $352 for annual car registration, depending on their car's weight, but under the plan the fee would be based on engine capacity.
Martijn Wilder, the advisory panel's chairman, said he supported financial incentives being used to encourage vehicles that produced less greenhouse gas.
***** North
Sydney Council plans to vary residents' street
parking fees depending on engine size. ***** (ya gotta love that one)
Under that scheme, the fee for a
parking permit will be halved for "very low impact" cars, reduced by a quarter for small cars, kept the same for most family sedans and increased for large four-wheel-drives and cars with eight-cylinder engines.
"The panel supports what the council is doing," Mr Wilder said.
"It's not perfect. You're not going to catch everyone, but you're not going to do that anyway."
The insurance company IAG has previously raised the possibility of reducing premiums for those who drive shorter distances, but Mr Wilder said that could hit poorer people in outer suburbs, while the registration fee method would not.
"I think [it] is a more equitable way of doing it," he said.
The panel's response to the Government's greenhouse strategy discussion paper makes six recommendations, including varying stamp duty on cars based on emissions, introducing incentives for people to use hybrid cars and bicycles and lobbying the Federal Government to do away with subsidies and tax breaks that encourage people to use large cars.
The discussion paper said cars and trucks produced 88 per cent of transport emissions, with half of that coming from private vehicles.
"While private fuel consumption has decreased due to improved technology, this has been offset by increases in new-vehicle weight and power," it said.
In London, cars powered by alternative fuels, such as Toyota's Prius, are exempt from the £5 congestion charge to enter the city centre. China has recently adopted fuel consumption standards for four-wheel-drives that some analysts say are tougher than those in the
United States.
The Government is understood to be less than enthusiastic about the registration fee idea, but another of its panellists, Adam Spencer, said more should be done so that people knew the environmental effect of their everyday actions.
"I think fundamentally people aren't aware of the greenhouse impact and the environmental footprint of their day-to-day actions, whether that's zipping around in a car or running the clothes drier," he said. "I support in principle a wide range of actions that would educate people more to [those] impacts."
Michael Salmon, a spokesman for the Premier, Bob Carr, said the greenhouse strategy would go to cabinet soon and would be released for public comment in a couple of months.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Rego-rebate-plan-to-reward-smallcar-owners/2005/05/03/1115092503043.html