A leading transport executive doubts the carbon tax will be an incentive for people to stop driving their cars.
Australian Bus Industry Confederation executive director Michael Apps said the carbon tax, if implemented, would force coach services to pay more to put their buses on the road in 2014, but it wouldn’t affect greenhouse gas emissions because there would be ”just as many cars on the road”.
The Government will seek to establish an effective carbon price for heavy on-road liquid fuel use from July 1 2014.
Mr Apps said the proposed carbon tax didn’t address the main problem of reducing greenhouse emissions because light commercial vehicles and households would not face a carbon price on the fuel they used for transport.
”It compensates car users,” he said. ”It doesn’t incentivise the use of other passenger transport services such as coaches.”
The carbon tax is expected to affect Murrays Coaches, Deane’s Buslines and Greyhound Australia in 2014.
He said there needed to be a focus on encouraging people to leave their cars at home.
”Since cars are the biggest emitters of greenhouse emissions - you would think the carbon arrangements should have focused on how you reduce overall emissions from the transport sector,” he said. ”The best way to do that is provide them with other incentives to use other forms of more sustainable transport.”
ACT Chamber of Commerce chief executive Chris Peters said the carbon tax would affect consumer confidence in Canberra.
”It will compound the fact that our retailers are hurting and hurting badly,” he said.
Mr Peters believed businesses in the community would be indirectly impacted by rising costs in electricity.
He said the tax would impact on large-scale users of non-renewable energy such as Blue Star Print Canberra, the National Convention Centre and Crown Plaza.
