It’s the old bait and switch. It’s illegal when shopkeepers do it, but it’s perfectly legal if it’s the government doing the baiting and switching.

The government cannot be trusted. Whatever it is urging you to do in one year, it’ll be punishing you for doing it in the next. And whatever solutions it’s offering you this year will be weaponized against you in the next. This story is about both of those things happening at the same time a bait and switch incentive being punished and a bait and switch solution laying the foundation for a digital prison.

We’ve seen the bait and switch before. For example, people who installed rooftop solar panels because they were promised generous feed in tariffs to pay for it, only for those feed in tariffs to be taken away once they’d spent their money. Or how about people who diligently saved money into their superannuation account only to be stung with the upcoming unrealized gains tax on their balance? Those are just two out of many examples. Jump in the comments and give me some more examples that come to mind for you.

But sadly, Australians still haven’t learned anything and are still falling for government bait and switch tactics time and time again. And this time there is an extra sting in the tail. They told everyone to buy an EV because among other reasons, you won’t have to pay the fuel excise because you’re not buying any petrol or diesel. But now, now that lots of people have bought their EVs, they’re planning to switch Australia over to a road user charge specifically because it will also apply to the EV owners who were silly enough to believe them.

But on top of that, all modern cars already have tracking and communications technologies built into them to enable this road user charge to potentially become a digital prison.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. And a road user charge has the potential to change Australia a great deal in ways that are not good for us at all depending of course on the details, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

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Now, let me begin with the fact that from a strictly economic point of view, a road user charge does actually make a lot more sense than the fuel excise that we have right now. Now, stick with me here. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. We just need to give the devil his due because there are some good arguments that will be used to justify the road user charge. It doesn’t mean that the way that the road user charge will be used in the end is actually good for us. It just means that from a strict economic standpoint, they’re going to be able to make some very strong arguments to justify it in the halls of Canberra and implement it on the basis that the economics makes sense. Which is why we need to talk about this.

There is a simple principle of life that works basically all of the time in basically every circumstance and that is that things work out better in the long run when people have to pay for what they use directly rather than paying for it indirectly. This is why socialism always ends up failing because socialism by definition removes the direct payment for things like healthcare and education and roads etc. and makes those payments indirect which destroys the incentives to do things like providing value for money or even just having a good product or service. And it also rewards freeloading and punishes independence punishes people who want to provide for themselves ultimately leading to a collapsing marketplace, and oh, I don’t know, just off the top of my head, leading to things like long wait times for ambulances, years of wait times on surgery lists, failing education standards despite more money than ever before being spent on it, crumbling roads despite record fuel excise, just to name a few random things off the top of my head. Not that any of those things would be happening right now in Australia, of course, you understand. Just hypothetical.

Now the reason why direct payment from buyers to sellers for goods and services works better is because prices are actually a conversation. They are providing us with information based on which we then sort out our own priorities and needs and what we want to spend money on. And our decision whether to buy or not buy based on the price that we’re offered is also information. We are providing sellers with information every time we say yes and every time we say no to a transaction. So in a world with a completely free marketplace and without any sort of coercion or regulation restriction on the markets, every transaction is then voluntary and is only done on the basis that both sides believe that they’re better off after the transaction than what they were before. If either side of any transaction looks at it and goes, “Actually, I’m going to be worse off,” then they walk away.

So that’s why free markets create wealth so quickly because people who are allowed to trade freely on the basis that they are in their own opinion better off after the trade, well, that adds value. And that price information tells providers what people want more of and where they want it, leading to resources going into the areas where they’re needed and valued most.

Okay, market economics is obvious, but surely that principle doesn’t apply to public goods like roads, does it?

Well, it should, but it doesn’t at the moment because we don’t pay for our roads directly. We pay for our roads indirectly, very indirectly actually through the fuel excise of more than 50 cents per liter, which is collected by the federal government. But then the federal government hands a bunch of money to the state governments as general revenue. And then the state governments then decide how they’re going to spend that money what portion to spend on road maintenance and road construction. And then once they’ve decided how much they’re going to spend, they decide where to spend it. Which roads are they going to maintain? Which ones are they going to improve or widen? Where are they going to build new ones? And which ones they’re just going to neglect cuz they don’t have the money.

It’s all centrally planned and controlled. The market has no say at all, which means that in the end there’s absolutely no price information anywhere in the system connecting the decision of a road user to drive on a given piece of road to the maintaining or improving of that piece of road. There’s no financial incentives for the government to care about spending their road maintenance money in the right places. And not all of the fuel excise actually ends up being used on roads in any case. According to the Automobile Association of Australia, only about 57% of it actually gets used on land transport expenditure and the rest goes elsewhere.

So our current system, well, it’s kind of sort of a user pays system, which is better than making non-road users pay for maintenance and the building of the roads, for example. So it does at least have that going for it. But there is no direct way through any kind of price signals to determine what a given piece of road is worth to road users. And as a result, we’re not getting very good value for money with crumbling roads despite record levels of fuel excise revenue.

Okay, so that’s the background. So, one of the selling points of a road user charge, one of the reasons that we’re going to be told this is such a good idea, especially a road user charge enabled by, let’s say, GPS that tracks you everywhere you drive, is that with all of that road user information, the government can better decide where to spend its limited budget on maintaining and improving roads. And then even better, if they then change the road user charge for different kinds of roads or perhaps at different times of day, like an Uber style surge pricing structure where you have to pay more if you want to use the roads at the same time as everybody else. Well, then you can get detailed pricing information and fluctuating value so that the government can better allocate resources. You understand? So that we can better serve our beloved public.

But you see where this is going, right? From a purely economic standpoint, this argument is actually correct.

It’s correct. There is now price information which is going to lead to better allocation of maintenance resources if that’s what they were actually going to use that information for. But there is no way in hell that we should ever consider allowing the government to track our every move on the roads like that because that information is far more useful to them than just for deciding where to allocate road maintenance budgets and collecting revenue from road users. We only need to look at the very recent past to see how such information could be weaponized against all of us in an emergency. 5 km radius. Anyone?

15-minute cities are not a conspiracy theory. There are various trials happening around the world. And a 15-minute city would be just a button press away if we were to allow such a system to come into place. And the trouble is that it is almost inevitable that we will get a road user charge of some form. The question really is what form is that going to take and how invasive and how much tracking is there going to be? The government is claiming that it’s losing too much revenue because of EVs not having to pay fuel excise. This is the bait and switch. People bought EVs because the government said, “Buy those and you’ll save money.” Now they’re saving money. And the government says, “Well, this is the reason why we need a road user charge.” But they’re not even being entirely honest there either. Of course, this is the government we’re talking about after all because according to the budget forward estimates, the government expects fuel excise revenue to continue to increase even as they are planning to spend less money on roads and land transport.

So, what’s actually happening is that the increase in fuel excise revenue is being slowed down. The adoption of EVs is not causing the fuel excise revenue to decrease. It’s just causing it to increase more slowly and that’s the entire justification that they are using for switching from a fuel excise to this road user charge.

Now like I said, a road user charge that more directly connects which roads are being used, how often and at what time of day with some sort of a price signal would from an economic standpoint be a big improvement over what we have now. The system would naturally generate pricing information about which roads need to be fully maintained and which ones can perhaps take a back seat. But also the same system that allows them to have that pricing information also allows them to always know exactly where your car is. And it is one step away from being able to dictate to you where and when you can drive. Or perhaps not dictate, but rather manipulate the road user charge to change your behavior, nudge you in ways that they deem to be beneficial for whatever their KPIs and objectives may be, net zero, for example.

They don’t have to lock you in a 15-minute city explicitly. All they would have to do is just, oh, I don’t know, charge you double or triple the usual road user charge for every kilometer that you travel that’s more than or I don’t know 25 km from your registered address or charge you surge pricing for traveling during peak hour or fine you for driving in a manner that they deem to be risky or any one of a myriad of other things.

At that point, all the market signals get destroyed. There’s no free trade or mutually beneficial transactions creating price signals that benefit everyone anymore. At that point, this is just a system of financial manipulation, coercion, and control. And I don’t think that’s an accident. The economic argument will be used to justify it and then the economics of it will be destroyed because actually this is not about better economics. This is about control.

They’re already doing this with electricity, by the way. They’re not putting in place quotas to limit your electricity consumption. They’re not saying, “Oh, you have a certain number of kilowatt hours per day,” at least not yet. What they’re doing is destroying Australia’s energy market so that prices are sky-high so that we have to ration ourselves for our own financial reasons. Oh, we’re not limiting your electricity use to achieve net zero targets. Not at all. People are just using less. I wonder why.

15-minute cities in Australia aren’t likely to look like some dystopian movie with big concrete walls everywhere.

And they probably won’t even have the digital checkpoints and the traffic filters like what they’re trying in Oxford City in the United Kingdom as well as other systems elsewhere. Because if they get a road user charge that involves continuous monitoring of your car, they won’t need any of those things. They won’t impose bans or boundaries or limits. That would be too obvious, too politically unpopular, and completely unnecessary. They’ll just tweak the rules around the road user charge so that you lock yourself into a digital prison because you can’t afford not to. This is a bait and switch.

Now, there’s no question that this will be yet another of the terrible, horrible, no good, hairbrained ideas that will be discussed at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s round table this week. And I’ll be keeping an eye out for the outcomes from that meeting so that I can keep you informed on what to look out for as they work towards implementing whatever hairbrained ideas come out of it.

Now, I don’t like to be negative, but I’m also not going to lie to you and pretend that everything’s fine. It’s not. A road user charge that involves full-time monitoring of private vehicles is a line that we must not be willing to cross. Now, there is still a lot to play out before we know whether that’s what they’re actually going to try and implement. They might, for example, simply impose a road user charge based on mileage every year when you reregister your car. And that at least wouldn’t bring with it the same danger as what constant monitoring obviously does.

But then again, I don’t think they’re going to settle for that. I think they’re going to use the economic arguments about having better information the detail of the information so we can better allocate resources to road maintenance. And as far as that economic argument is concerned, they are right. But they’re going to use that even though that’s not the real objective here in my opinion, because in my opinion, this road user charge is just another bait and switch.

At some point, Australians are going to have to stop trusting our government. But apparently we’re not ready for that yet because despite being sucked in on rooftop solar, sucked in on superannuation, we are still being sucked in right now on EVs and on this new household battery scheme. So, for the time being, I’m just going to have to keep an eye on it and keep you up to date on it as we wait to get a clearer picture of how our beloved and benevolent government is going to help us next with a road user charge for our own good, of course.

My name is Topher Field. This is the Topher project and this is what I do. I help busy Australians to keep up to date and to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. If you appreciate reports like this and the work that I do, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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