Here's an idea.....Abolish the Vehicle Registration Annual Fee.

This system is effectively already in place.

Registration allows you to drive your car on the roads
Petrol tax hits you for the number of km’s you travel.

Thing I would add is something along the lines of the NZ Third party insurance scheme where everyone is covered by the govt third party for injury.

Nice in theory for people living in the city who have alternatives, but try to float that idea in rural areas and their language will make you blush. Unless you provide exemptions or subsidies for rural sectors, you’ll have an uprising on your hands.

If governments were serious about removing traffic congestion they’d make motorcycle registration free. We need a system that encourages people not to drive on their own to and from work.

dtc said :

– it will result in people owning multiple cars and storing them on the streets/nature strips etc – there is no cost until you use the car (except for opportunity cost but people ignore that)

Opportunity cost is pretty minimal if the vehicle in question has nearly no dollar value.

I have always thought that costs per km is the fairest way to go, and imposing that through fuel cost seems the only way to avoid the system being rorted (odometers can be disconnected pretty easily).

Add to this the emission benefit due to this enhancing the saving from more efficient cars and you have another driver.

If the government really wants to drive the market in electric vehicles though (as far as I know there isn’t a single from-the-factory electric only vehicle on the Australian market), they could pretty easily offer free rego for electric only vehicles for, say, the next five or ten years. Of course that is just subsidising coal powered road transport, but that is another issue.

The current system is good and equitable, leave it alone.

A teenager has described his amazement after being quoted almost £33,000 ($51,000Au) to insure his second-hand car.

Jake Redshaw, 17, from Salford, bought a six-year-old Vauxhall Corsa for £3,000 ($4600Au) after he passed his test earlier in March.

He told the BBC he expected comparison website insurance quotes to reach about £3,000 – but received a headline figure of of £32,819 from the AA.

The company said the figure was a mistake and should not have appeared.

Jake, from Eccles, was hoping to use his car to travel to Pendleton College, where he is studying IT, and his part-time job in a warehouse.

“The average [price] was probably about £12,000, £13,000 and the cheapest was £5,700. And I got £33,000 from AA,” he told the BBC.

“I was amazed because I was expecting to pay £3,000, £4,000, but not that high.

“I can’t insure it. If I want to go out I’ll have to get my mum or dad to drop me off to go out. I can’t be independent as I wanted to be.

“At 18 it apparently goes down, so I’ll have to wait until then. But it’s only a couple of months away so it’s not that bad.”

According to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), 12% of drivers are aged 17 to 24 – but they are responsible for almost 30% of accidents.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ma … r-12824940

Conceptually, I like it.

Practically, I see some hurdles which my be hard to jump.

– Vehicle safety checks will have to tighten up (to at least yearly in line with other states) as people will be much more likely to have a dodgy car they only use once a blue moon (since there is no cost associated with a car in the garage not being driven).

Makes too much sense, the Government will never let it come to be.

The Henry Tax Review proposed that people who drove more kms pay more for rego and other costs (rather than just paying for more petrol as they do now). If you’re interested in this idea, give it a read as he integrated this in with his various other suggestions.

After years of work, to have one thing cherry-picked out of the whole (mining tax) must have been pretty galling.

This idea has been suggested many times and, as you say, is a much better deal for those who don’t use their car much or on lower incomes but need a car. Recently the environmental implications (use it and it costs more/use a petrol guzzler and it costs more) have been raised.

Apart from the need for a national scheme, the arguments against it that I have heard (not saying these all have merit) are

– if people have a car, they will use it. Rego and insurance can prevent people buying cars in the first place (because large up front payments are harder to bear than small frequent payments eg mobile phone plans)

– it will result in people owning multiple cars and storing them on the streets/nature strips etc – there is no cost until you use the car (except for opportunity cost but people ignore that)

– it may reduce revenue because petrol consumption will go down. It doesnt cost the govt any additional money if more people use petrol, so petrol tax is effectively a ‘free tax’ ie the roads still need to be built, the govt is better off if more people drive because it doesnt cost anything more than the road already costs. If you decrease use of the road, it still costs the govt the same amount to build the road (consequentially, the govt then needs to raise other taxes) (a counter argument is that public transport then becomes less unprofitable)

– it prevents having an upfront incentive to more efficient cars eg having reduced rego for low emission cars (I am not sure if we actually have this anyway, but it prevents us from having it)

I suspect the real reasons are

– potential tax reduction
– inability to get national consensus eg farmers/rural people will complain
– the govt’s need to make everything self funding if at all possible, meaning that the cost of running a car registration system has to be directly funded from…car registration (rather than funded from a revenue source that is someone removed frmo the actual registration system)

I don’t see the advantages. As far as I know, the government side of car registration is really no different to, say, rates for having your garbage collected. It doesn’t matter if your neighbour throws out twice as much rubbish, you both pay more or less the same per bin.

Rego is made up of various components such as Third Party Insurance, the road rescue fee, etc, etc. Someone may want to correct me or expand on this but I’m sure there are numerous reasons why these costs vary from state to state.

An increasing number of comprehensive insurers seem to be offering slight discounts if you drive less – but this is a different kettle of fish.