Little government offers big government transport solution.
It’s not like it’s big brother or anything….
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. …" ― P J Proudhon
There is a great deal of virtue in the user pays principle but this is ridiculous. Qld. Local Government Association of Queensland CEO Greg Hallam das devised a plan to use technology to track motorists and tax them:
BIG Brother may soon know exactly where and when you drive your vehicle, what roads you use, how fast you go, where you park and for how long and the identities of all the people you visit.Demand management is a far different idea to user pays. User pays means that you pay for that proportion of a service or asset that you access; demand management is the use of heavy charges to cause a drop in the use of facilities. The latter is heavily favored by governments, the result being that water, which covers 70% of the earth’s surface, is rationed by government monopolies.
Every detail of your motoring and associated business and social life would be recorded and the information used to tax you, if the State Government adopts a new road funding plan apparently advanced by Local Government Association of Queensland CEO Greg Hallam. The comments sparked outrage at this week's Gympie Regional Council meeting.
Cr Ian Petersen said Mr Hallam had been quoted as saying: "Governments can't afford new infrastructure... so what we need to look at is a demand management approach.
"We've got to think differently; abolish all existing road user charges and introduce technology to track how far and where drivers go," Mr Hallam was reported as saying in a Brisbane newspaper.
What an idiot. I've been banging on about this for years, since the days when 'Red' Ken Livingstone's London congestion charge was still just a proposition. The user already pays, and has been doing so since someone dreamed up the idea of fuel duty. And not only that by they pay in proportion to their use and the system is self altering to account for the fuel efficiency of the vehicle as well as travelling at peak times (which carries the double penalty of taking longer - congestion is its own disincentive to begin with). Drive an old gas guzzler in the suburban rush hour every day and you'll pay a hell of a lot more than someone who drives a modern common rail diesel off peak on the freeway even if both your annual mileage is exactly the same, and if the latter decides to drive less then the difference will grow. On top of all that it requires no modification to vehicles, cannot be avoided by any means short of stealing petrol, and is incredibly cheap and easy to collect. It's the perfect example of a system that any rational politician would be desperately keen to leave alone, so I can come up with only two reasons why one would change it. First, they're not rational and for al I know may even be bordering on functionally retarded. Second, conceding something works rules out any opportunity to claim the credit for fixing it, which is why politics is so often about creating problems where none existed before.
ReplyDeleteSecond, conceding something works rules out any opportunity to claim the credit for fixing it, which is why politics is so often about creating problems where none existed before.
ReplyDeleteYou have just answered the unspoken question I have been searching for. I remember back in the old Progress Party days, a main roads engineer asking one of our guys why roads would not fall to pieces under our policies.
Old mate asked what the result would be if all fuel tax were put into funding roads. The engineer replied that they just couldn't spend that much.
Pretty much answers this idiot.