In Senate Estimates I asked who funded and supplied the electric vehicle charging stations (58 in total) at Parliament House in the Capital. Taxpayers are funding the Canberra bubble’s fling with EVs to the tune of $2.5m in installation costs, with the vague promise that this will be recouped in the future. The reason given for the charging stations is to make it convenient for EVs to visit Parliament House. Despite most Australians owning a petrol or diesel car, there are no immediate plans to install petrol or diesel pumps at Parliament House for their convenience.
As the city with the highest average income in the country (over $100,000/year), the Canberra bureaucrats are truly out of touch with the rest of Australia.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Chair, and thank you for appearing today. The Department of Parliamentary Services has installed 10 electric vehicle charging stations in the public car park. Are they user-pays, or does the ‘Department of the Australian Taxpayer’ fork out for the cost of that electricity?
Mr Stefanic: The user pays.
Senator ROBERTS: Which company owns the chargers, then?
Mr Stefanic: I’ll have to take that question on notice. I’ll correct myself if I have misspoken, but I believe DPS owns the asset that has been installed. We contracted ActewAGL to provide the services with the installation.
Senator ROBERTS: AGL?
Mr Stefanic: ActewAGL, which is a Canberra based joint venture with AGL.
Senator ROBERTS: But DPS owns the chargers?
Mr Stefanic: I believe so.
Senator ROBERTS: How much did you pay for the installation?
Mr Stefanic: The contract for installation is about $2.5 million. We are tracking under budget. When all 58 electric vehicle charging stations are installed we anticipate the cost will be in the order—
Senator ROBERTS: Fifty-eight?
Mr Stefanic: There will be 58 in total. There are 10 in the public car park, 10 in each of the private car parks and eight in the ministerial wing.
Senator ROBERTS: Sorry, what was that again?
Mr Stefanic: Ten in each of the private car parks and eight in the ministerial wing car park.
Senator ROBERTS: How many private car parks?
Mr Stefanic: Four.
Senator ROBERTS: So you’ve got 40 chargers?
Mr Stefanic: Forty in those. Then the 10 in the public and the eight in the ministerial wing make 58.
Senator ROBERTS: So we’re paying for this, but a provider of electricity is making money out of it?
Mr Stefanic: The charges that we are levying for it have two elements: one covers both our administration cost and a recovery of the capital investment, and the other portion of it is the payment for the cost of the energy that goes to the provider.
Senator ROBERTS: So the provider is making a profit out of our—the taxpayers—investment?
Mr Stefanic: The energy provider, as it would for any electric vehicle charging station.
Senator ROBERTS: I didn’t realise that it was within your remit to cover the operating costs of people driving electric vehicles around the Canberra bubble?
Mr Stefanic: It’s not, because it is user-pays, as I mentioned.
Senator ROBERTS: But you’re providing a lot of taxpayer money to enable it.
Mr Stefanic: With the take-up of electric vehicles—and Canberra has, I think, the highest per capita take-up in the country—the range of those vehicles, I guess, necessitates us to lean into the issue and make sure we have availability for charging locally. To the point that Senator Hume raised around people being able to leave the building, sometimes it’s difficult, and having the convenience of a charging facility available at Parliament House is useful. In the public car park in particular, we have around 800,000 visitors a year to Parliament House. With the increase in the take-up of electric vehicles, it enhances our destination from a tourism point of view if people can see that they have access to electric vehicle charging when they arrive here.
Senator ROBERTS: You’re acknowledging that electric vehicles have some inconvenience attached to them, so you’re making provision to supplement that?
Mr Stefanic: No. I’m simply saying it’s a reality. There are electric vehicle charging stations popping up everywhere. We’re simply another building that’s installing them.
Senator ROBERTS: Subsidised by the taxpayer.
Mr Stefanic: They are not subsidised by the taxpayer because we are recovering that capital cost.
Senator ROBERTS: The installation is subsidised but then you recover, which is a pretty good deal for the providers.
Mr Stefanic: We use our capital funds to install the infrastructure, but then we recover the cost from the user.
Senator ROBERTS: How are your plans to install a diesel or petrol bowser progressing?
Mr Stefanic: There are no plans for fuel bowsers.
Senator ROBERTS: Why not?
Mr Stefanic: You need a storage mechanism for those things. So it would be difficult to begin with, given the building, to dig massive holes in the ground to put in storage facilities.
CHAIR: No hydrogen plant then either?
Mr Stefanic: No.
Senator Shoebridge: Next we’ll all get nuclear reactors.
Senator ROBERTS: Is it because diesel and petrol are easier to refuel? You’re saying it’s an inconvenience to use an electric car, so we need to provide services for electric cars so we can make sure we have plenty of visitors to Parliament House?
The President: If I could just correct the record—the department secretary didn’t say it was inconvenient to use an electric vehicle.
Senator ROBERTS: He didn’t use those words; he used other words. Are you aware that electric vehicle sales in the United States and the European Union are plummeting?
Mr Stefanic: No. I’m simply looking at statistics in Australia and in the ACT in particular, which indicate that the take up continues to grow.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s interesting because electric vehicles are inherently much more expensive than diesel and petrol and less efficient overall in use of resources. Canberra has the highest income per capita, as I understand it, of any city in Australia.
Mr Stefanic: I’m unsure of that.
How can electric cars defend our country, allso how the heck can they work in the country, logically??.
Our country people are being stranglehold everything and we provide city’s heaps.
Fully agree
Even Yanki Joe has seen the light & asked to delay the push.
Once again the minority is given preference.
Currently the price of power is through the roof, how much higher will it go to help fund the GoGo mobiles.
I would like Chris Bowen to work for 1 month with my tradie sons concreter and plasterer and see how the other half physically work no holiday pay no super paid for them. Driving electric vehicles to their jobs carting materials great large sheets of mesh cement mixers shovels straight edges wheelbarrows they work in 40 degree heat no choice no shade um🤔electric vehicle is a joke
My house burned to the ground in June 2023, I have been homeless since, I attempted to be included on my daughter’s rental property, but the new “Property Manager “ migrated in the last 6 months from NZ, refused to lodge my application, claiming my staying in the house for 2 weeks prior to my application, was in breach of my daughters lease and sent a notice of breach. Which left me living in my car, I was then advised, living on my land, was also against council law. I now basically live wherever I can park for the night. I have been through every agency every avenue, to be told there is no housing for me, I attended the local department of housing office, was interviewed by a you woman, who told me to go to relatives and friends, I asked her if she had a home, could I stay there then asked how long she had been in this country, she told 12 months. I am selling my property. But unless I can get enough to buy a home, I will still be homeless. I am 60 years old on a disability support payment, there is no way I would get finance for a home. Worked all my life payed taxes in this country, and immigrants get homes ahead of me! Worse still it’s immigrants telling me there is no housing for me!
Vote the current alp-greenies gang out and openly charge them for the theft of oxygen. Laws of thermodynamics exists regardless of parliamentary votes.
The climate scam in full view. So called renewable energies cannot recover their carbon footprint generated from extraction to manufacture, maintenance and installation. They rely on child labour and exploitation to mine their rare earth components and without public subsidies are un-economical. This is just a forced wealth transfer from public to private hands. A farce of public policy and the economic raping of the electorate. Abandon this climate crap. CO2 levels could double and the radiation retention of the earth would increase by 1%. This is a fake emergency concocted to steal our money and our rights.