The Taxpayers’ Union is calling the Government to scrap its EV charging rort that will see millions of taxpayer dollars funnelled into the hands of private companies despite the policy doing absolutely nothing to reduce New Zealand’s net emissions.

Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns Manager, Connor Molloy, said:

“National is supposed to be a party that believes in markets. Why are they wasting millions of dollars on a boondoggle that will do little more than subsidise wealthy Tesla owners and dish out corporate welfare to the very people who campaigned against them with misleading and deceptive advertising during the election period?

“Sock-puppet lobby group Better NZ Trust is urging the government to ‘just get on and spend it’ – very convenient for a group whose founder and trustee, Steve West, is also a director and major shareholder of ChargeNet a private company that has received more than $7 million in corporate welfare from EECA to subsidise their commercially operated charging stations.

“Simeon Brown and Simon Watts know that this won’t reduce New Zealand’s net emissions and is nothing more than an expensive virtue signal filling the blackhole created from their inability to explain their climate policy and the Emissions Trading Scheme.

“Any uptick in the use of EVs as a result of this policy may reduce transport emissions but, under New Zealand’s capped ETS, this reduction will be completely nullified by an increase in emissions in other sectors as carbon credits that would have been purchased for transport emissions are simply sold to other emitters to use. The end result is taxpayers are left out of pocket while the country’s emissions remain unchanged.”

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