My bicycle costs nothing to register, and is fueled by energy that I create myself.

I should ride it to work more often instead of driving my turbocharged sedan.

Sgt.Bungers said :

No it’s not a rip off, in fact it’s not at all reflective of the cost of motor vehicles on society.

Assuming a very generous average of $1000 per registered vehicle, registration of passenger motor vehicles, motorcycles and utes including CPTI insurance raises around $15 billion per year.

Motor vehicle crashes costs alone cost Australia almost $18 billion per year (2006 figures).

On top of that, we have road maintenance costs, road building costs, (infrastructure), cost of land taken up by high capacity roads and car parks, environmental costs, tax consessions for car leasing/use.

Not to mention indirect costs associated with the private motor vehicle being the main form of transport for the majority of the country… high rate of heart disease, social costs, we’re officially the fattest nation on the planet, pollution costs…

One could argue that a person driving 5000 k’s per year should not have to pay as much as someone driving 100,000 k’s per year… but the idea of registration charges based on distance travelled meets fierce opposition at every turn.

I would have to disagree. This argument takes a wide approach to the entire effect on the community, which is valid, but you have not considered the other side of the coin, being the positives they provide to the community. In the absence of cars, we would have horses which would be worse for some of these issues and would cost far more to our economy in missed opportunity and productivity and freedom(which you can’t quantify so easily) than anything else that is negative about them.

rhino said :

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads.

The amount of money needed to maintain roads, clean up after crashes, etc. and everything related to car ownership far outstrips any money the gummint makes from car registration.

If you want a ‘user pays’ system then registration would increase tenfold.

rhino said :

pete09 said :

Congratulations. As a car driver you make a contribution towards the roads you use.

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads. But I guess it is fair to have only the people using the roads contribute money towards them in theory. Although having 2 cars and paying twice as much doesn’t make as much sense in this regard. You can only be driving one of them at a time. So if you have 2 cars and drive 5kms to work every day or you have 1 car and drive 30kms to work every day it doesn’t make sense really that the 2 car guy pays twice as much. He can only drive one of them at a time.

Valid point re: pool of money, however the roads and related infrastructure budget is definitely larger then revenues raised through rego.

As for your second point, I agree. A system that charges rego based upon KM’s driven would be fairer, however creating one that doesn’t discriminate against rural residents and is politically implementable seems impossible.

Jim Jones said :

rhino said :

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads.

The amount of money needed to maintain roads, clean up after crashes, etc. and everything related to car ownership far outstrips any money the gummint makes from car registration.

If you want a ‘user pays’ system then registration would increase tenfold.

Cars allow a massive percentage increase in productivity. Our economy would halve or something drastic like that if we went back to horses. And we would still need some kind of paths for the horses to be maintained. The income taxes the government collects from this drastic increase in productivity would be very large.

rhino said :

I would have to disagree. This argument takes a wide approach to the entire effect on the community, which is valid, but you have not considered the other side of the coin, being the positives they provide to the community. In the absence of cars, we would have horses which would be worse for some of these issues and would cost far more to our economy in missed opportunity and productivity and freedom(which you can’t quantify so easily) than anything else that is negative about them.

In other parts of the world where the majority of people do not own their own motor vehicles, they’ve managed to implement this ingenious system of things known as trains and trams. There’s also bicycle route networks, 24 hour bus services that come every 5 to 30 minutes around the clock.

Nothing wrong with a sensible approach to privately owned motor vehicles though.

However at present, the motor vehicle is the first, and sometimes only choice for people in Australia… especially Canberra given we live almost exclusively in low density housing areas. Low density housing in cities is unsustainable for many reasons… one of them being it makes public transport less viable, and forces people to own at least one car each. This is hardly sensible.

Jim Jones said :

rhino said :

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads.

The amount of money needed to maintain roads, clean up after crashes, etc. and everything related to car ownership far outstrips any money the gummint makes from car registration.

If you want a ‘user pays’ system then registration would increase tenfold.

How much money out of the fuel excise collected from the operation of motor vehicles goes to funding road infrastructure?

pete09 said :

rhino said :

pete09 said :

Congratulations. As a car driver you make a contribution towards the roads you use.

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads. But I guess it is fair to have only the people using the roads contribute money towards them in theory. Although having 2 cars and paying twice as much doesn’t make as much sense in this regard. You can only be driving one of them at a time. So if you have 2 cars and drive 5kms to work every day or you have 1 car and drive 30kms to work every day it doesn’t make sense really that the 2 car guy pays twice as much. He can only drive one of them at a time.

Valid point re: pool of money, however the roads and related infrastructure budget is definitely larger then revenues raised through rego.

As for your second point, I agree. A system that charges rego based upon KM’s driven would be fairer, however creating one that doesn’t discriminate against rural residents and is politically implementable seems impossible.

Yeah I’d agree with that. I don’t know the numbers, but it sounds likely that the costs of infrastructure etc would be definitely larger than the rego collected. In that regard it doesn’t seem so unfair of a number. But since it is just a pool of money, you also have to consider the rest of the taxes they collect from you. Overall you pay thousands in income tax plus thousands in GST and thousands in fees like rego, licences, levies etc. Roads and infrastructure should be one of the main goals for all of this to be spent on. So I guess it’s more of a complaint of overall tax levels. If they cut income tax, I’m sure people could live with high rego levels too. But it is good to subsidise the rego a bit, because it is something that almost everyone needs to pay for and the poorer people often need it even more than the richer people yet pay the same for it. I guess it’s hard to balance a fair system, but within the specific CTP system in ACT, it does seem from the discussion that the government side of the system is set up in such a way as to waste our overall society resources and be a bit unfair. There is definitely room for change to make it more efficient and fair.

chewy14 said :

Jim Jones said :

rhino said :

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads.

The amount of money needed to maintain roads, clean up after crashes, etc. and everything related to car ownership far outstrips any money the gummint makes from car registration.

If you want a ‘user pays’ system then registration would increase tenfold.

How much money out of the fuel excise collected from the operation of motor vehicles goes to funding road infrastructure?

None of it goes specifically to ‘funding road infrastructure’.

That’s not how tax works.

Jim Jones said :

chewy14 said :

Jim Jones said :

rhino said :

The thing is though, it just goes into the pool of money they spend on anything, along with all the GST money and fines and levies and fees and charges etc. They don’t strictly spend it on the roads.

The amount of money needed to maintain roads, clean up after crashes, etc. and everything related to car ownership far outstrips any money the gummint makes from car registration.

If you want a ‘user pays’ system then registration would increase tenfold.

How much money out of the fuel excise collected from the operation of motor vehicles goes to funding road infrastructure?

None of it goes specifically to ‘funding road infrastructure’.

That’s not how tax works.

You were the one talking about a “user pays” system, I was simply pointing out that a large amount of tax is collected through the operation of motor vehicles outside of vehicle registration.

rhino said :

But since it is just a pool of money, you also have to consider the rest of the taxes they collect from you. Overall you pay thousands in income tax plus thousands in GST and thousands in fees like rego, licences, levies etc. Roads and infrastructure should be one of the main goals for all of this to be spent on. So I guess it’s more of a complaint of overall tax levels. If they cut income tax, I’m sure people could live with high rego levels too.

Welcome to the Federal/State fiscal imbalance party…

Rego goes to the state government. In theory the state government is also responsible for road funding. However, income tax and GST goes to the Federal government, which doles it out to the states as the Feds see fit (in theory all GST goes back to the states). So the Feds may earmark some money for road funding, or even give the states additional money for roads (eg joint funding for the Pacific Highway).

But the chances of the states reducing rego because income tax is ‘too high’ is pretty much zero.

Aeek said :

screaming banshee said :

Exactly why my ute is registered in QLD saving me around 5-600 a year.

I look forward to the cameras cracking down on this rort. You are eroding the revenue base and driving up the costs for everyone who registers legally.

Until they are wiling to do something about all rental cars being registered in vic, I’m not expecting any problems. Besides any ctp claim resulting from an accident would be drawn from the QLD pool and contributions to the act road funding pool are made every time I fuel.

I am 100% behind a user pays system though which should be levied through a per litre levy on fuel. The less you drive the less you pay, the worse fuel efficiency the more you pay and it would make owning more cars more affordable to get rid of the excuse of a single person driving an suv to work because they need it to take the soccer team to practice on the weekends.

Our rego and insurance is due right now and because of the ridiculous enormity of the CTP insurance we are wondering whether to only get third party insurance through AAMI instead of fully comp. Even though the car is used to basically only take the dog to the park and the odd work trip when a bus can’t do the trick, we are veering towards fully comp as we had an experience a few years ago where we were hit by a driver who was not insured AT ALL. We ended up obviously claiming on our insurance, which otherwise we could not have done if we’d only had third party.

Anyway, looking at the bills I have to pay, I can’t get over the fact that AAMI will replace my car in it’s entirety for an almost paltry $470, compared to the CTP cost of $772 through NRMA.

If the market in Canberra is too small for other insurers to bother, then why really does the NRMA bother? Even if another insurer could shave off $100 they’d get more business.

It does seem to go up exponentially.

Madam Cholet said :

Even though the car is used to basically only take the dog to the park .

Have you asked the dog to contribute? You know, seeing how he’s too lazy to walk to the park.

Bump. I’ve finally got up off of the floor after opening our rego notice for the next 12 months on our very small second car. An increase on last year of $61. Almost 8%. I’m astounded. Won’t bother carrying on about it, but just to say that I don’t think it’s justified.

If it costs too much, don’t buy a car. Driving is a privilege not a right. And don’t get me started about lack of public transport etc etc, you also chose to live where you live knowing this information.

NRMA monopoly on insurance keeps the ACT coffers warm and fuzzy.

Actually, you’ll notice that by far the biggest portion of that cost is the TPI (Third Party [Personal] Insurance). At first I’d thought, like others, that this was due to NRMA having a monopoly in the ACT. The ACT Gov’t was supposed to be opening it up to other insurers years ago with the idea of making TPI more competitive, but other insurers don’t consider it worthwhile offering TPI insurance for such a small market with such high costs involved.

From further investigation, it appears that the ACT laws are what cause TPI to be so expensive (and possibly why it’s not worthwhile for other insurers to get involved when, at best, they’ll only get a portion of a small but troublesome market while NRMA has the whole market). The issue is that under ACT law, TPI onlys cover the party who is NOT at fault, whereas other jurisdictions cover both parties (whoever may have been injured). This sounds counter intuitive, but if you’re not covered if someone decides you’re at fault, you’ll make sure that you can pin the fault on the other party, and how do you do that? You hire an expensive lawyer to argue for you for weeks, months or even years – as long as it takes. Ironically, the legal fight over who’s right and who’s wrong costs more than the cost of covering the injuries of both parties. And it’s the overall costs that the insurance company has to cover. So the ACT Gov’t is denying insurance cover to injured ‘at fault’ parties as well as further feathering the nests of the lawyers when it would be cheaper to dispense with the lawyers and simply cover the injuries of all parties involved.

Madam Cholet said :

Bump. I’ve finally got up off of the floor after opening our rego notice for the next 12 months on our very small second car. An increase on last year of $61. Almost 8%. I’m astounded. Won’t bother carrying on about it, but just to say that I don’t think it’s justified.

And with elections conveniently out of the way for another three and a half years, I reckon we can look forward to further increases of several times the rate of CPI for rego, and various other ACT Government rates/taxes/charges.

youami said :

If it costs too much, don’t buy a car. Driving is a privilege not a right. And don’t get me started about lack of public transport etc etc, you also chose to live where you live knowing this information.

Excuse me whilst I put you straight. I take the bus three times a week, my husband once. We have a child. He goes to school. We both work, we need a second car in case our work which pays the bills requires usto go somewhere other than the office. My husband goes to Sydney to visit his father in a nursing home once a month so I need another car to get about and do the things that need to be done. For many years we did only have one car until such time as we needed another.

So before you jump to conclusions about someone’s motives for having a car, put your brain in to gear and think about someone else instead of yourself.

Chop71 said :

NRMA monopoly on insurance keeps the ACT coffers warm and fuzzy.

The NRMA does not have a monopoly they are the only insurance company prepared to offer CTP insurance in the ACT.

Madam Cholet said :

youami said :

If it costs too much, don’t buy a car. Driving is a privilege not a right. And don’t get me started about lack of public transport etc etc, you also chose to live where you live knowing this information.

Excuse me whilst I put you straight. I take the bus three times a week, my husband once. We have a child. He goes to school. We both work, we need a second car in case our work which pays the bills requires usto go somewhere other than the office. My husband goes to Sydney to visit his father in a nursing home once a month so I need another car to get about and do the things that need to be done. For many years we did only have one car until such time as we needed another.

So before you jump to conclusions about someone’s motives for having a car, put your brain in to gear and think about someone else instead of yourself.

I don’t see how the above 2 posts are conflicting. Some people need to use the car (I have one). And if you need to, then pay for it.

Madam Cholet said :

Even though the car is used to basically only take the dog to the park and the odd work trip when a bus can’t do the trick

It does seem to go up exponentially.

It doesn’t. Unless by “seem to” you mean “I don’t have to do the math but…”

Anyway, I drive the Australian median amount annually (10,000 km). Over 12 months, 25% goes to rego (rego+CTPI), 30% to maintenance, 30% to petrol. Total cost of $3382. Not including depreciation.