Electric vehicle sales in Australia have doubled in the wake of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and the ensuing fuel crisis, as Jim Chalmers promises to clamp down on any petrol stations trying to gouge drivers when Labor’s excise cut fades out on Monday.
For the first time, EV and hybrid vehicle sales made up almost half – 49.16 per cent of new car sales – in the three months to June 2026, in a sharp acceleration of the ongoing drift away from internal combustion engines, according to figures from the Australian Automobile Association.
With EV sales picking up, Australian motorists should still expect sticker shock at petrol stations, with ongoing tensions in the Middle East continuing to play out in higher oil prices on top of the excise cut removal.
The discount is worth 16c a litre. Petrol prices have risen about 40c a litre across the country in the past month, driven largely by renewed hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz. For example, the unleaded price in Sydney rose from 152c a litre at the end of June to 193c this weekend.
The Treasurer on Sunday directed the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission to ramp up monitoring of bowsers now that fuel excise would return to normal, after Labor’s scheme kept prices lower for four months to the cost of nearly $3bn to the budget.
“Any price increase that can’t be explained will face serious scrutiny from the ACCC,” Dr Chalmers said in a statement. “Servos and suppliers are on notice – the regulator will be watching them like a hawk. We’ve jacked up the penalties for petrol stations that rip off Australians. They face multimillion-dollar fines if they break the law.”
The government said it would not extend the excise.
“It is very expensive,” cabinet minister Mark Butler told News24, previously Sky News. “(We) didn’t take this decision lightly when we first made it back in March, but we thought it was really important to provide households and businesses with that cost-of-living relief, that budget relief.
“When we got to the end of June, we also thought it was important to ease the return to situation normal.”
He said when the excise discount was halved in July – from the original 32c a litre to the 16c it has been for a month – “you saw the price creep up over several days”.
“I would expect the same to happen here, given the excise is not levied at the bowser (but) before petrol goes into tanks under the service station.”
Energy Minister Chris Bowen at the weekend stressed that Australia’s fuel reserves remained high and oil deliveries to Australia were on time and of consistent quantity.
“Consistently we’ve asked, take no more, no less than the fuel you need to get you through,” he said.
Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume declined to say whether the Coalition thought it was the right choice to let the excise discount expire. “We’d like to see the government deal with the primary cause of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis first and foremost,” she told the ABC’s Insiders program. “It’s a decision for the government,” she said when asked again. “But Australians are going to feel the pain, there’s no doubt about that.
“They didn’t need to feel this pain because it would have been lessened if we had a more resilient economy and the government had done its fair share of the heavy lifting to get inflation down.”
On the uptick in EV sales to almost half of new car sales, she said this showed “probably why we don’t necessarily need more subsidies for electric vehicles”.
“The market is doing exactly what it should,” she said.
Extracted in full from: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/almost-half-of-new-car-sales-are-evs-as-petrol-excise-discount-ends/news-story/42704afbd43fa8fa2c5448e699d99453
