Shadow minister for Transport Warren Truss claims the National Transport Commission has been exposed using a flawed formula to calculate road-user charges for next financial year that will see the Federal government siphon $2.4 billion from the wallets of trucking operators.
“The NTC has used four-year-old figures to calculate the number of trucks on the road,” Mr Truss said.
“Despite accurate data on today’s truck numbers being freely available, the NTC opted to take 2008 truck registrations and extrapolate a theoretical fleet size that under-estimates truck numbers by 170,000 units,” he said.
“Given there are about 570,700 (not the NTC’s estimated 397,000) trucks on our roads, the cost recovery charges to maintain roads paid by individual truck drivers should be notionally divided among a much larger number of vehicles,” Mr Truss said.
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