Senator ALLISON (11:46 AM) —The Democrats do not believe it is necessary to proceed to an inquiry on this issue. We agree that there need to be changes to the current arrangements and we have been talking with the government and with industry to find a workable solution, and I think we are very close to that. In fact, if you talk with the industry you will find in fact that the trucking association is not opposed to this restriction and that it is really a question of dealing with the problems for the importers of diesel engines and, as I say, I think we have found a solution to that problem.

The Democrats set stringent requirements for the importation of second-hand diesel engines as part of the tax package, as Senator O'Brien has already indicated. There were two reasons for that. We think engines imported into Australia should be able to demonstrate that they meet our current standards. Very few countries in the world set standards and then allow those to be watered down by the bringing-in of equipment that does not meet those standards. We need to draw attention to the fact that the Australian standards are woefully lower than the standards overseas. That is thanks to previous governments that have neglected this whole question of air pollution and have put us in a situation where diesel trucks in Australia are 14 to 15 years old on average. That is on average, which means that there are a lot of trucks rumbling around, particularly in the cities, spewing out enormous amounts of pollution. For this reason 1,160 is the estimated number of people who die directly from the particulate pollution that comes from diesel engines.

So our fleet is much older than those in most OECD countries and it is much more polluting, and engines that are being imported include those that are 20 years old, 30 years old and even older. Unlike other countries, we do not require vehicles to be tested to ensure that they comply even with our miserable standards, so another failure of previous governments is that we have in place a regime where we do not even know whether the vehicles that are on the road meet the standards that we have. The result of this is that maintenance is ignored here and that diesel engines continue to spew out their particulate laden dangerous emissions. I heard the other day that the engineers for CityLink, the tunnel project in Melbourne, had to install exhaust equipment which was designed to cope with pollution levels that have not been tolerated in Europe for more than 17 years. It is a great pity that the residents of Richmond and the residents of other suburbs around freeways and tunnels of this sort will have to put up with the concentration of this pollution for some years to come. However, we have now put in place measures that will correct the situation.

So we did fix up the question of pollution in our tax negotiation with the government, and our emission standards, instead of being a decade or more behind Europe, the United States and the UK, will catch up by going to Euro 4 standards by the year 2006. I remind the Senate that particulate emissions for Euro 4 are 95 per cent lower than our current standards. Dirty diesel, the diesel that has high levels of sulphur in it, makes it impossible for even the newest, best maintained engines to perform efficiently and cleanly. That too has been dealt with in our tax package with the government. So from the year 2003, diesel with a sulphur content of more than 50 parts per million will be penalised by an extra 2c a litre excise. Again, thanks to previous governments, we tolerate a level of sulphur 10 times that of the UK, and if you ask any truckie they will tell you what sulphur does to their engines. It costs them an enormous amount of money and it certainly does not do anything for pollution.

While the problem will eventually be fixed by emission standards, by fuels and by the other measures that are in place, we do not want Australia to become a dumping ground for engines that other countries will not allow on their roads. Already we take thousands of vehicles from Japan for just that reason: Japan no longer wants them. Australia has become a poor cousin and is accepting polluting vehicles while other countries are not. Having said all that, we did see the arguments of the engine importers that testing overseas would be prohibitively expensive and that changes to this substantial side of their business would seriously affect them. There is an issue relating to spare parts; also, one-third of the 5,000 engines imported are used in farm machinery and farmers are concerned at the cost. We are amenable to revisiting this situation. We are not prepared to undermine the very strong policy position of new emission standards but I feel that we are well on the way to developing an alternative arrangement which will fix the problem. Of course, that problem will not exist in a few years, once we join the rest of the developed world in testing vehicles regularly on the road. If they do not comply, they will need to be fixed or they will simply be off the road. So this arrangement, which I hope will be announced by the government very shortly, is relatively short term in nature. It is the responsible thing to do, and I do not believe we need a Senate inquiry to find a solution.