Page 813 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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MR RATTENBURY: I table the following paper:
Fuel consumption and cost comparison—Table.
In this table I have compared four vehicles, all of them being five-seat family sedans. The analysis reveals some very interesting figures. I have compared the Toyota Prius, the Toyota Camry hybrid, the Holden Cruze and the Ford Falcon XR6. Interestingly, the Prius is not the most expensive of these vehicles. I have included in the table retail price based on a standard analysis.
Despite the popular perception of the Prius being very expensive, it in fact is not the most expensive in that set. I have included data on the consumption per hundred kilometres and then I have calculated, using average travel distances and the Australian Bureau of Statistics average petrol price, the annual cost of fuel. What it shows is that for the Toyota Prius it is $813.54 a year, for the Toyota Camry hybrid it is $1,439.34 a year, for the Holden Cruze, $1,752.24 and for the Ford Falcon XR6, $3,045.56. What this table demonstrates is how important vehicle choice is when it comes to the cost of living. In a range of five-seat vehicles you have a very different set of costs.
This table also highlights just how confused the Liberal Party are when it comes to their cost of living analysis. The reason I say this is that just last week in CityNews there was a photo of a beaming Zed Seselja giving away a Ford Falcon XR6. The car was a prize in a recent Liberal Party fundraising raffle.
Before things get twisted, I have no problem with the Liberals giving away a car as a raffle prize. It is a tried and true fundraising method and I guess when you have so many vacancies you need to go down other paths. My question is: why did they give away a vehicle that has such an ongoing cost of living burden?
The article in CityNews tells us that Mr Seselja personally rang the winner of the vehicle. I will not name the gentleman because it is unnecessary for the story, but he apparently said, “I did not actually believe it was Zed Seselja on the phone.” That was a kind of funny aside. But I wonder whether in that phone call, after Mr Seselja said “Congratulations, you have won the vehicle,” he also said, “By the way, this vehicle has a much higher running cost than the equivalent vehicles of its class”? Did he say, “We could have given you a vehicle that costs $25 less a week to run but, hey, what is a bit of cost of living pressure between friends”? I suspect Mr Seselja did not say those things.
This is the very same Liberal Party that will come into this chamber and thunder about the injustice of increasing household energy bills by around 50c a week to help fund a transition to renewable energy via a feed-in tariff. But here they are celebrating a vehicle that costs nearly $43 a week more to run than a similar sized hybrid vehicle.
This is not an anti-car thing. This is not an environmental thing. This is purely about the cost of living and saying that if you need a five-seat family sedan there is a very extensive range of vehicles you can access. But the Liberal Party are handing out one
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