Thursday, 20 June 2024

Vehicle regulation

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (19:04): (986) My adjournment tonight is to the minister for transport. In recent years we have seen more and more truckzillas on the streets of Melbourne, huge American-style pick-up trucks and SUVs lumbering around narrow streets that were never designed for them. As the Rammed report by Comms Declare makes clear, we did not just wake up one morning and decide we wanted to pick up the groceries in something the size of a World War II tank. Car companies have more than tripled their advertising on big utes since 2010 to convince us all that we need them, because they mean bigger profit margins than the normal-size cars that people drove until more recently.

These rapidly expanding vehicle numbers have consequences for everyone around them. They do not fit into normal parking spaces, spilling out onto the next space, the footpath or the roadway. They have huge blind spots, making them more likely to hit pedestrians, cyclists and even other cars, and when they do, the damage is far worse. Their boxy fronts and huge mass mean children are eight times more likely to die when hit by an SUV. This is not to mention the climate consequences. These truckzillas guzzle so much fuel that the International Energy Agency has warned that increases in the size of vehicles could effectively cancel out emissions reductions from electric vehicles, which incidentally is why we also need more mode shift.

These behemoths may have a use on a farm or a building site, but they are not appropriate for regular passenger duties on narrow inner-city streets. This is not the Wasteland. We are not going to run into Furiosa or Dr Dementus when we pop down to the shops, so we do not need monster trucks clogging our streets.

Other jurisdictions are taking action. Within Australia, New South Wales and WA have weight-based registration systems that incentivise lighter vehicles, while internationally Paris has recently tripled the price of parking for these larger vehicles. The action I seek is for the minister to protect Victorians by properly regulating these truckzillas.