Thank you for your support! This open letter has now been submitted to the Ministers. Tell the government: We want more electric utes in Australia.
Dear Minister for Transport Catherine King MP,
Cc Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen MP
My name is Peter Stray. I’m a fifth generation beef and sheep farmer in the Golden Plains region of Victoria. Thank you for your promise to design and deliver fuel efficiency standards for Australia. I am writing to urge you to make our standards strong and well designed. We need them to be competitive and effective so Australian farmers can get our hands on cleaner utes and cars that are cheaper to run. I’m a member of Farmers for Climate Action – one of more than 8,000 farmers across Australia who want to see deep emissions reductions across the economy this decade. Farming is getting harder. With an El Niño declared, we started destocking because I don’t want to go through another season wondering if I can feed my animals. Minister, we want to do our bit to reduce emissions to make sure that we can keep farming into the future. We want cleaner, lower emissions farm operations – including our vehicles. But we can’t make the business case stack up because the choice of electric and fuel efficient vehicles on the market in Australia is so limited. They’re also far too expensive. There are utes being made with ranges of around 800km now. If we can sort our fuel efficiency standards out, those utes will make it to Australia instead of just to the EU and US.
I already drive further and pay more for fuel than those in the city, so the cost of living impact is getting increasingly real. Australia is one of the only wealthy countries in the world without legislated national fuel efficiency standards. If we get our standards right, it’ll be an incentive for manufacturers to send far more low and zero emissions new vehicles (including farm utes) to Australia. Farmers and regional Australians want stronger Fuel Efficiency Standards. Which is why I’m inviting them to sign their names to this letter to ensure there is no doubt in our message that we need the Australian Government to step up and sort this out.
Sincerely,
Peter Stray