Steph Chalmers

best case scenario, months ahead of shipping disruptions and higher fuel costs.

You know, what does that mean for the price for people who haven't kind of been early adopters?

And does it become just another area where if you're already wealthy, you already have the cash behind you to get an EV, then you're even more immune from fuel costs?

Yeah, well, we've seen even with, you know, as you were talking about the cost of charging, we haven't really seen electricity prices spike.

But we know that, you know, Australia has plenty of solar, but largely so far the benefit of that has flowed to people who own their own homes, you know, don't live in apartments, aren't renting.

They have been able to, you know, take up these subsidies to get panels, then more recently battery subsidies.

So we do see the government...

Having this proposal, I think it's coming into effect in a couple of months time for customers in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia.

The default market offer for electricity will involve a few hours of free power during the middle of the day.

And the idea of that is to kind of share the benefit of Australia's rooftop solar boom among people who aren't in a position to have the panels themselves.

You know, in that way, you could see perhaps you have an EV, you can time it to charge at a particular time, but still, you know, the people who've had the capital behind them to, you know, take up all these subsidies for solar and batteries and now EVs.

Yeah, as you say, what does this do for the Reserve Bank trying to, you know, control demand through interest rates if you've got a growing portion of the population that...

owns their home outright or has a smaller mortgage and then perhaps can access all these other things that further insulate them from price rises.

I wonder if now wouldn't be the time to do it while you're still offering these pretty generous incentives in terms of tax concessions through novated leases.

Because there was talk about perhaps some of those being wound back early this year.

So that was actually why we decided to look at it in early gen, because there was a review underway and I thought it was going to get taken away.

But it hasn't.

So while you're still, you know, giving with one hand, perhaps it is the time to, you know,

reintroduce that idea because I saw it being talked about yesterday, but to be honest, it hadn't actually crossed my mind as an aspiring EV owner.

So I would have been pretty shocked if I got whacked with a new tax in a few years' time, I think.