Both the Federal Government and Opposition have proposed easing the pain of ballooning petrol prices with flat tax reductions. The Prime Minister favours a cut in GST on petrol, while the Opposition leader wants a five cent reduction in excise.
However they would be doing us more of a favour if they treated oil dependency as an addiction, and actually imposed extra taxes that would further increase the price of petrol. This is the logic behind the Government's strategy to reduce the cost to community health and wellbeing of other addictions and social ills such as tobacco and binge drinking.
Oil usage at current levels is unsustainable. We all depend upon oil to maintain our lifestyle, but supplies are finite, and greenhouse emissions caused by motor vehicle use are a major contributor to climate change on a calamitous scale. We need to make radical changes at all levels, from personal to global.
The energy crisis of the '70s shocked us into action. Substantially increased petrol prices precipitated greater fuel economy in the manufacture of cars. But the oil giants eventually dropped prices and we resumed our bad habits.
Outspoken Melbourne university transport planner Paul Mees is a lone voice in his advocacy of increased petrol prices. He told ABC Radio that motorists complaining about high prices are forgetting that fuel would soon have had to cost more anyway, to address the problem of climate change.
'The whole point of an emissions trading scheme is to make things that produce a lot of greenhouse emissions more expensive and since 20 per cent of our emissions come from transport that inevitably was going to meant that petrol prices would go up.'
It's obvious that the Federal Government would need to direct revenue from any increased petrol excise into subsidies for those in business and geographical situations which require motor vehicle use at or near current levels.
A policy update issued last week by The Climate Institute suggests higher prices do in fact lead to greater fuel efficiency. It points out that fuel taxes are about eight times higher in the UK than in the USA, and that this results in substantially lower average per capita fuel expenditure.
The Institute argues that Australian moves to reduce petrol excise would 'lock in choices based on expectations of lower prices', and actually make communities 'more — not less — vulnerable to future increases in world fuel prices, as well