Many people like to whinge about the price of fuel, but Steve Fielding’s idea of cutting fuel taxes is a very bad idea — it would inevitably lead to more usage, and cutting prices is the last way you want to try and fight oil shortages.

This opinion piece for ABC Online goes into more detail.

Petrol tax cuts the road to ruin
By Daniel Bowen

Who can forget the Great Petrol Rip-Off of the late 1990s?

Outraged motoring groups pointed out that fully half of the pump price of petrol was made up of government taxes. It was a scandal and an abomination. Governments were punishing the motorist by making their petrol expensive - at a whopping 90 cents a litre.

Read the rest.

On Saturday my bro-in-law Adrian and I were headed up to Coburg in a hired van. We were just getting onto the Bolte Bridge when Adrian noticed a warning light on the dashboard. We weren’t sure what it meant, so I reached for the van owner’s manual, which said something along the lines of:

1. Make sure the handbrake is off.

Well Adrian twiddled it as much as you can when driving at freeway speeds, and it was definitely off.

2. If the handbrake is off, immediately stop the vehicle and urgently contact your dealer as the brake fluid is low, which may lead to brake failure, your van crashing into something, and you and your passengers dead. DEAD!

Well, something like that.

Naturally, we panicked. I got on the phone to the hire place, and asked if the brakes appeared to be working. They were. Then they said to drive to their Preston office, in Murray Road. Okay. I hung up.

How do you get to Murray Road? Dunno, there’s no Melway in this van. Argh!

Rang my sister for directions. Got directions. Got off the freeway, headed for Murray Road. While at traffic lights, Adrian fiddled with the hand brake again, and… you guessed it, the light went out.

Blargh. So we didn’t die from brake failure after all.

I blame the indicator light thingy. Must be over-sensitive.

I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads.

I saw this in action on Tuesday at a discussion at Treasury Place. The same day the RACV were seen on the TV news calling for the expansion of roads at the end of the Eastern Freeway, and “missing link” ring road sector through Melbourne’s northeast “green wedge” — or else Melbourne would grind to a standstill.

I don’t believe that for an instant. Melbourne would survive, and could thrive if no more freeways were built, and the money was put into public transport instead. In fact, just the $1 billion currently being spent to add two extra lanes to the Monash Freeway would pay for at least two major rail lines to be built.

And while the RACV continues to claim that more road building helps traffic, what it really does, apart from burning billions of dollars in transport funding, is provide more road space that gets more people driving, undermining cycling, walking and public transport, and leading to further traffic congestion and pollution.

I don’t want my money going to lobbying. But it turns out there are alternatives for getting roadside assistance, which don’t involve the RACV.

I found one (outdated) list of options, but of these, some are affiliated with RACV: Assist Australia, Caltex. ANZ at one stage had Auto Assist, but it’s not clear if that’s still on offer, nor who they outsource(d) to.

Some don’t make it clear if they outsource: International SOS, Mondial Roadside Assistance (won’t touch vehicles over 10 years old, which rules me and my 15-year-old Magna out).

Hard to know how good they are when you’re in a spot, but it looks like 24/7 Road Services might be one to try. Base-level coverage for $55, so it’s actually cheaper than RACV. I’ll make sure they’re not involved in lobbying, and I’ll going to sign up with them when my RACV membership expires.

And if you’re another one of the RACV’s 1.9 million members, and are only in it for the road service, and don’t want your money to pay for lobbying for paving the planet, I’d encourage you too to move your business elsewhere.

I may not be the world’s foremost expert on driving, but even I could see you made two critical mistakes driving out of the supermarket carpark.

1. You drove the wrong way around the one-way system.

2. Your baby was on the lap of your passenger.

I hope that you were pulled over and booked on the way home. But if not, I hope you didn’t collide with anything.

You, sir, are a thoughtless moron.

PS. You’re not doing the reputation of P-platers any good, either.

I got the car serviced the other day. Perhaps unusually, when I went to pick it up, there was no multi-gazillion dollar bill waiting for me; just $197.

But the guy warned me about various symptoms that were evident but not critical yet that may lead to a higher bill the next time. (He sounded like the dentist, actually.) As per usual I just nodded my head and tried to pretend I knew what he was talking about. Front and rear roll stoppers cracked. Yup. Timing case seal leaking. Oooh. Front suspension bushes cracked. Yeah, they can be nasty.

So it sounds like it’ll be ka-ching next time.

Whenever next time is. I know services are meant to be about every six months or 10,000Ks, whichever comes first. But with my small amount of driving, it takes about a year and a half to rack up 10,000 kilometres, and it’s pretty hard trying to convince myself to go to the trouble and expense of a service more frequently. Maybe I should at least learn how to change the oil.

I’ll always need to drive sometimes (if only for my own sanity… PT and a bike just isn’t going to cut it for some trips, not from where I live). Is there a car out there that is reasonably cheap, clean and safe, and is better suited to occasional driving, and thus very occasional servicing? Something that doesn’t mind if it sits in the driveway six days a week?

Ideally the answer would be a shared car, but so far none of the companies (Flexicar and GoGet seem to be the most prominent in Melbourne; are there any others) have put cars into downtown Bentleigh. It’s probably a bit too suburban. (Unlike, say, Richmond — Beth has one parked virtually outside her house.) Indeed, there are car rental outlets that are closer than any of the car sharing locations, which could potentially work, but alas none within walking distance.

No, I guess I’ll just have to put up with the occasional ka-ching huge repair bill.

It’s now just over ten years since Princess Diana died. One thing I didn’t mention in my blog post at the time was that when I got home, I found my VCR, which had been set to tape an obscure Sunday morning TV programme (the rather amusing look at the parables of Jesus, Wrestling With The Big One, with Tony Robinson), had picked up a news bulletin of the accident, from before her death had been announced. It’s kind of erie watching it today.

If nothing else, her death should serve as a reminder to always wear your seatbelt.

(I had thought that crash survivor Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard, was wearing his, but apparently not. But crash analysis did conclude that the injuries would have been minor if the car’s occupants had been wearing theirs.)

I’ve only ever been in one car accident. I was a kid, in the back of the babysitter’s car, when it hit the back of a tray truck at low speed outside our flat in Hotham Street. The tray came through the windscreen. No injuries, but shock.

Thankfully that’s all I’ve ever been involved in, with the exception of a minor carpark bump or two. But it still sticks in my mind.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I prefer not to travel by car when there are alternatives.

My car is dark grey. A recent study found that dark-coloured cars are more prone to accidents. In the rain, like this morning, I drive with my lights on, for visibility.

It’s like my friend Merlin, who rides a motorcycle. Where he lives in Canberra, you apparently don’t have to ride with your motorcycle headlight on (or didn’t, when I asked him about it a few years ago). But he said “my bike is road-coloured, so I do”. Sounds fair enough.

But note to self: Turn car lights off when parking.

That way, I won’t get back to it 9 hours later and find the battery flat and have to call the RACV guy and run the motor for a while to get the battery charged again. Like I did tonight.

…

On the bright side, at least I didn’t park it like this, across two parking spaces:

Or go driving like this:

Dishwashers: On the subject of water (I think Andrew or somebody mentioned this a while ago) in last Sunday’s Age M magaziney thing, there was an article noting that dishwashers generally use less water than handwashing. Dishwashers are in the 13 to 20 litre per cycle range, whereas handwashing is up around 40 to 60. Yay — for once you can be lazy and environmentally friendly!

What they don’t appear to mention, however, is ensuring the dishwasher is full before using it. To do that, I’ve bought extra crockery and cutlery as appropriate, so I don’t run out of things between running it every couple of days.

Boomers: Saturday’s Age A2 section (which I’ve only just got around to reading) notes it’s ten years since Mark Davis wrote Gangland, a book I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time. Davis writes now:

Somewhere deep in the fabric of Australian cultural life it is forever 1974. The Whitlam government is still in office. This Day Tonight is still on television. Patrick White has recently won the Nobel Prize. The last fading bars of Eagle Rock echo from the Sunbury stage.
…
Many of the figures who stood out in 1997 as playing a disproportionate role in Australian cultural life by and large continue to do so. Kerry O’Brien, Robert Manne, Peter Craven, Phillip Adams, Christopher Pearson, Anne Summers, Helen Garner, Richard Neville, Keith Windschuttle, Ray Martin, Clive James, P. P. McGuinness, Germaine Greer, Piers Akerman, John Laws, Michelle Grattan, Laurie Oakes, Alan Jones, Gerard Henderson and George Negus are still out there, setting agendas, demarcating standards, creating much of the intellectual and cultural climate. Whatever they breathe out becomes the oxygen of Australian cultural life.

– Turf war; Mark Davis. The Age. Melbourne, Vic.: May 19, 2007. ; p. 12

I know what he means, though he misses the one I like to take potshots at, Barry Humphries. Maybe ‘cos Humphries too old to be a Boomer, born in 1934. Or maybe it’s not the type of cultural influence Davis is looking at.

But it’s a very interesting read, even if I don’t totally agree with all of it. I can’t find it publically online, probably as it’s due to be republished in fuller form in Overland, though it is available in Gulliver/ProQuest.

Parking: I’m not trying to dob people in, but I reckon the local council should send parking inspectors around to schools at morning drop-off time. People parking across driveways; people parking too close to corners; people backing up around corners; people parking (and leaving their cars) in “set-down only” areas. They’d make a fortune.

Crude: ABC TV, tonight 8:30pm.