Consolidated revenue is not like that. We know where consolidated revenue goes, but it’s impossible to identify a pathway of specific dollars incoming to a specific expenditure, unless the monies raised are sequestered for a particular purpose. Which in this case, they are not.
Let’s say there’s a kids birthday party. Every parent tips a number of identical black jellybeans into a jar which was already half full with black jellybeans. Those jellybeans are then distributed to the kids and there are some leftovers. Exactly how many of
your jellybeans were given to young Billy and not to young Jessica? No way to know.
Certainly in NSW the massive expansion in DCFC infrastructure under the $170M Drive Electric grants would have been unlikely to survive the budget process without the promise of future RUC revenue to partially offset it. But how much would they have spent without that? And what proportion of the RUC will go towards it? Impossible to know, impossible to tell, impossible to measure. It’s all one big bucket of money.
However there is no excuse to not know exactly how much revenue the RUC raises once it comes into effect, and I expect NSW will be able to answer that question easily, even though VIC apparently cannot. After all, NSW is the only state with real-time vehicle registration data, sliced and diced in every conceivable manner, freely available online:
app.powerbi.com
For example, I can tell you in NSW there are 41,083 battery EVs registered, 24,533 of those are Teslas, and 1978 of those are red.
I get people are cynical about these things, but I’m not about to jump on the bandwagon when people expect the absurd.