Mike Hosking: Don't try to make me buy an electric car

Real Kiwis love their fossil fuel-powered cars. Photo / Matthew Hansen

Genter needs to spend some time in rural NZ to stay in touch.

I was on holiday last week, and when I say holiday, I mean at home. We bought a place in the country on a whim but we love it and we love spending time there so our holidays these days mean staying home. So I guess that means in our own small way we're saving the planet ... in that we're not hopping on a plane and travelling to the other side of the world, which is what we used to do.

We're also helping to save the planet, because since we've owned our rural bit of paradise we've planted at least 100 large trees and are just completing a "regen" programme involving 7500 natives.

We are so in "carbon credit" it isn't funny.

We didn't set out to "save the planet" of course. Like most people, that's not why we did it, but it's a good byproduct.

Most people plant trees on their property to cut the mowing bill or to add value to the place. Reducing your carbon footprint is a bonus.

It's what's commonly referred to as a win-win scenario — we get a nicer place to live, the planet gets some of the help it needs.

But as I sat outside the cafe in a small town near us last week, I was doing what I always do, staring at cars, and a theme quickly emerged.

Julie Anne Genter hasn't spent a lot of time in rural New Zealand.

There wasn't an electric vehicle to be seen. There might have been a hybrid. I suspect the Mitsubishi Outlander could have been the part-electric version.

But even if it was, in the several hundred cars that passed by while I was observing, it would've been the sole contributor to her bizarre vision of having us all ditch the cars we actually want, like, and choose, and engineer us into something we don't.

What I did see, of course, was a selection of SUVs and utes. Why?

Because those are the cars we like, and those are the cars that are practical, and those are the cars that help run businesses.

Rural New Zealand is a mass collection of small business operators, so in effect what Julie Anne is doing is taxing business — again.

Her idea to subsidise the cars she likes and tax the cars she doesn't isn't new, of course. It's been done overseas for years, most famously in Norway.

But a bad idea is still a bad idea, even if you repeat it.

What makes her version worse is that she claims it will be fiscally neutral.

She cannot back up such a claim.

She doesn't have the slightest clue what we will do when we are offered the choice of an $8000 discount on one car and a $3000 penalty on another. She needs a lot of people giving up $3000 to offset the sale of a single EV.

Who pays the $8000? We still do of course. Like all these hare-brained ideas that aren't thought through, it's always the taxpayer who ends up footing the bill.

Has she thought about the impact on the car industry in terms of jobs and investment? Has she thought about the fact the discount goes to Nissan, Mercedes, BMW and Audi?

Is the Government really interested in subsidising multibillion-dollar foreign operators?

Where does Winston fit into this? How does he explain to his rural constituency that paying even more for the Hilux, on top of the levies and taxes already imposed, is somehow a good idea, and that the cash is headed for foreign pockets!

And then the purists' argument ... if these things are so brilliant, and saving the planet is so vital, why aren't we buying them all by ourselves? And what happened to free choice?

Having failed to make the argument satisfactorily enough, Julie Anne and her fellow social engineers do what they always do, force you into it.

If she spent half an hour watching the traffic in my small rural part of the world, she might understand how hopelessly out of touch she is.