OPINION: User pays system

I've been ramping up debate again amongst my parliamentary colleagues about a user pays system that guarantees money back to the owners of the roads.

We already have a user pays system and we pay it through our fuel prices. Whether you drive a truck or a car, every one of us pays a certain amount of excise per litre of fuel we purchase.

It's a user pays system already - but it has two major problems.

Firstly -the money collected in fuel excise doesn't go directly back to the roads - and it should. We started to change this in the latest budget, but there is a long way to go. At the moment we basically don't have direct hypothecation (channelling) of that fuel tax back to the owner of the road, whether that's the local council or the State Government or even the Federal Government. I think we should be doing that. To me, this is the single most important principle we should be talking about here. If we were to do this, I believe that we could accelerate investment in the Barton Highway.

The second issue is how that user charge should work. Should it be based on every litre of fuel we buy, or should it be based on the distance we travel, or should it even be based on where the road is. I take issue with claims from some that this would be a new tax for regional Australia and that regional Australia will be paying for it all.

Deloitte has done a piece of research quite recently that shows, if we did this right, it would be better for regional areas not worse.

We all know how much money is going into investment in roads in the cities and it's all about reducing congestion. If those charges were set so they were higher in the cities to reflect the congestion that's happening in the cities, I think you'd see the charges in rural areas dropping, not increasing.

There is no problem with accessibility of technology for this to work well - all you need is GPS tracking and we've got that already.

The truckies are correct to say that there are some fairness issues to work through, but the sooner regional politicians, regional leaders and regional communities understand all of this, the more we can shape it into a form that's to our interest.

We all agree the current system is hopeless. We all agree that we've had enough of the fact that at every Budget, someone says we should we charging fuel excise on farmers. I've got news for those people - the farmers don't use the roads. We've got to move on.

This is a debate that's not going to go away and I welcome all of your input.

Angus Taylor