George Orwell’s prophecies are coming true. Little by little our freedoms are being eroded by technology and by a government willing to use that technology to track your every movement:
Currently, electric vehicles are exempt from road-user charges, and do not pay fuel tax. If that exemption were ended – which the Government needs to make a decision on by the end of the year – it would need to look at new ways to pay for roads, Transport Minister Michael Wood said.
“[I]f it were not extended there would be a need to integrate EVs into paying RUC [road user charges]. I’m currently considering whether to extend that exemption – an announcement will be made in the future,” Wood said.
“We do recognise that when EVs are integrated into the RUC system, there will be a need to ensure they are fairly treated. For plug-in hybrids in particular, we want to ensure there isn’t a situation where they are double charged for petrol excise duty and road user charges,” Wood said.
A gradual phase-out of taxes on fuel would be the biggest shake-up of funding for transport in nearly a century – the first taxes on fuel were introduced in 1927’s Motor Spirits Taxation Act.
One option being considered is to replace the taxes with a GPS tracking system on cars, which could effectively toll drivers for how often they used the road.
Stuff
They’ll tell us it is just for calculating road user charges, until someone in the Police works out how useful this data is and starts going on fishing expeditions through your road user charge records.
Police already over-reach in their surveillance activities. Just last week Police tipped up to Gun City in Dunedin with a nice polite letter asking if they could trawl through their sales records to help “identify suspicious transactions”. Quite apart from being illegal under numerous Acts of Parliament, they didn’t even cover themselves with the thinnest of veneers by seeking and presenting a valid search warrant.
You can’t trust the Police, nor politicians when they tell you that these changes are just for something else.
Ministers haven’t drawn much attention to the review. Former Transport Minister Phil Twyford talked about work on reviewing transport funding in 2019 and an introductory briefing to the incoming minister Michael Wood said that officials were looking at new ways of funding the transport system.
But papers released under the Official Information Act show just how radical that shake-up could be, with the Government considering a full overhaul of the transport revenue system.
Stuff
I bet they don’t want to talk about it. This is yet another government application of technology designed to snitch on people.
They introduced ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras with nary a squeak. They track all the good compliant people with the Covid Tracer App. Police routinely grab cellphones and download Google Maps data by using the broadest search warrant application possible. Even insurance companies, when chatting to their clients under the guise of just checking some details of a claim, will get their investigators to con people into voluntarily handing over their phones so that location data can be “verified”.
We are now in a surveillance society, with smart everything, except the dumb citizens who use it all. You can be and are tracked almost every minute of the day. You can be and are being listened to almost every minute of the day by Google, Facebook, Amazon and the Police if they so desire.
This attempt to justify GPS tracking of all vehicles is just a thinly veiled excuse for tracking the movements of people, not vehicles. When the Police come calling, they’ll already have the fuel tax GPS data, then they’ll grab your phone and link your travels with your car’s travels and there they have it, a link between the vehicle and you.
And right about now the less smart of you will start saying, ‘Oh come on Cam, what have you got to fear if you aren’t doing anything wrong’…to which I’ll reply, ‘Do you really trust the politicians; the same people who want to imprison you for telling an off-colour joke?’
The solution is of course easy. Just charge all vehicles like they charge diesel vehicles, where you buy road user charges in increments based on your distance traveled. We don’t need or even want GPS tracking of vehicles by the government. A simple RUC regime is far cheaper and easier to manage…without government snitching and over-reach.