Mr BAYLEY - We touched earlier on the age of the vehicle fleet in Tasmania and in 2019 it was 12.9 years, the oldest in the country. The latest in 2021 it's now ageing even more at 13.3 years. The RACT has concerns about this. Do you share those concerns? Is it on the radar of the Road Safety Advisory Council and the Government? What steps are being taken to remedy it and encourage newer vehicles on the road?
Mr FERGUSON - I think both myself and Mr Kingston might respond to this. It's probably a question not easily answered by this table. While I'm happy to talk about it - and to the extent Mr Kingston is able to, we will - but part of the work of the Road Safety Advisory Council is to look at the age of the vehicle fleet and to develop policy and recommendations in relation to the light-vehicle strategy, which is being developed as we speak.
It's really outside the MAIB's specific purview but Mr Kingston, feel free to respond further. I would make the point that while Tasmania has an above average age of our fleet compared to the rest of the country, we offer the lowest premiums, so our scheme cost, despite being the most generous, arguably, I think more generous, but at least as good as Victoria and the best in the nation then, we offer the lowest premiums.
What the team is doing is working really well, despite the fact that we have an older vehicle fleet, which means that the mitigation when there is a crash is not as good in an older car as a newer one. Hence the light-vehicle strategy, together with some of the initiatives that we're doing in the State Growth space are targeted to encourage people to keep their cars as safe as possible and always to keep them registered. Mr Kingston?
Mr KINGSTON - Yes, Deputy Premier. The other aspect to that is the data hasn't been refreshed a lot since 2021. It's transferred from one Commonwealth agency to another but in that data, we also have the lowest attrition rate. So, what that refers to is when new cars are bought, people keeping their old cars registered. We have a very low attrition rate, which means people are keeping them on board most likely and we don't have any full stats on this but most likely a second car is doing less kilometres. We're not so worried in terms of kilometres driven on the road, that there's a massive exposure there because it stays old. It probably stays old because of the low cost. It is one of the lowest costs in the country to register and over the past few years, there's been changes to quarterly registrations which has given people a different way of paying if they are experiencing cost-of-living pressures rather than upfront and also the No Interest Loan Scheme has allowed people -
Mr BALCOMBE - I'm declaring an interest because I'm on the board of the No Interest Loan Scheme.
Mr KINGSTON - That has also allowed people to continue to buy cars and not necessarily always trade in their old one. That's not the same sort of people but with more cars staying on the road, we're still convinced that the newer cars are being driven more often, so our exposure per kilometre driven is most likely going down and most of the other states have a very high attrition rate, so people are trading in their car and going to the latest one. That's why they stay younger but they're in schemes where, for example, the Northern Territory charges two-and-a-half times our cost of premium alone, let alone other registration costs. So people can't afford to probably keep that second car. We're talking about a section of the community here that can afford to do that.
