The federal Coalition’s peak policy body for deciding issues relating to fuel emissions and electric cars has met 12 times in its four-year existence but minutes for five of these meetings cannot be found.
The revelations emerged during a public hearing of the Senate select committee on electric vehicles held last year when a member of the department of infrastructure, regional development and cities struggled to name the chair of the ministerial forum on vehicles emissions.
When asked by Senator Rex Patrick of the Centre Alliance whether the forum kept minutes of its meetings, Alex Foulds, executive director of the department’s surface transport policy division, replied: “No, they don’t produce minutes as such.”
Foulds told the hearing that the ministerial forum had met three times since it was set up “without [departmental] officials and with officials”.
“How do you know what happens there?” Senator Patrick asked. “This is a most unusual procedure for government – for government officials to meet and not take minutes, a record. That’s really quite strange.”
In a letter of correction sent in September, Foulds amended his evidence to say that while the “official stakeholder consultation” forums had met three times, the forum has met on nine other occasions, or 12 in total.
Following up through FOI, Senator Patrick’s office obtained just three sets of minutes, some in the form of “hastily” draft notes sent via email, leaving the others unaccounted for.
A messy back-and-forth then occurred between the Senate committee and the department which ended with some form of notes being found for all but five meetings of the forum – those where departmental officials were not in attendance.
The department did not arrange to be sent copies of records from those meetings.
The failure to provide documents when asked – and the run-around required to obtain them – was significant enough that the Senate committee chair, Tim Storer, wrote to the secretary at the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities asking them to address the lack of disclosure.
“Given that the committee’s consensus was that [electric vehicle] policy has suffered from the ‘relative absence of overarching policy direction’, it is disappointing that we know so little about the efforts of the ministerial forum charged with working on this very subject,” Senator Storer said.
“To give just one example, the department of the environment issued a draft regulation impact statement in 2016 which stated, among other things, that the health costs of business as usual to Australian cities of motor vehicle air pollution to $3.9bn a year in 2020.”
“Why that alone was not enough to compel the ministerial forum to take action is still unclear.”
Senator Patrick said the confusion and lack of proper record keeping showed a failure of good governance and demonstrated that the federal coalition was asleep at the wheel on electric cars.
“They’ve done nothing. No one has taken this and run with it,” Senator Patrick said. “Apathy seems to be the flavour of the day when it comes to this government on electric vehicles.”
Kim Carr, the shadow minister for innovation, industry, science and research, said the government had been failing to take fuel emission and electric car issues seriously.
“The government has had a taskforce that’s been meeting for four years and has done nothing. It’s not been able to produce any clear policy direction,” Carr said.
“In terms of a coordinated response on these basic questions about future directions for our vehicles, this government has nothing to say at all. There’s no sense of urgency about these matters.”
“There’s really basic questions here about the government’s hostility to the industry.”
The forum at the time was chaired by the minister for urban infrastructure, Paul Fletcher, and included the current treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, then in his role as environment minister.
The current chair is the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack.
