Matthew Wright is interviewed by Leon Byner of 5aa.

L: Of the near million new cars sold each year in Australia, around 400,000 are either government purchase, fleet or salary sacrifice vehicles and there is an organisation who believe that the Australian government should legislate that by 2010 all government, fleet and salary sacrifice vehicles purchased must be for vehicles using a hybrid drive system. Now, remember a lot of vehicles are bought by governments to support their local industry because a lot of tax payers money has been used to prop up the automobile industry in Australia, particularly in states like South Australia and Victoria, which relies very heavily economically on that part of the manufacturing sector. But of course the whole issue of global warming and our relationship with the environment has put very sharp focus on the sorts of things we do, particularly with motor vehicles, and we know that one of the chief pollutants in our general lives are motor cars. So what better than to use a hybrid vehicle. So let's talk to the lead campaigner from Beyond Zero Emissions, Matthew Wright. Matthew, thanks for joining us.

M: Good afternoon Leon, how are you?

L: Good. Explain to us the practicality of state and federal governments deciding to opt for a hybrid car, bearing in mind that at the moment there are some limited options, and indeed there is quite a waiting list to get them.

M: Yes, well a decision can only be made if they are going to support the local car industry.

L: Yes.

M: And that means that they're going to have to put their money where their mouth is and fund all four manufacturers to convert their production lines over to build hybrid vehicles.

L: Yes. The problem with that Matthew, you've heard in the debate I'm sure, is that the decisions to make cars of a different blueprint than we currently do in Australia, and of course we're doing the 6 and 8 cyclinders here as you well know, and these cars are manufactured overseas. So what you'd be asking the Australian tax payer to do is to give money to the head offices of these companies to use offshore in order that in Australia we are part of that manufacturing process.

M: Yes, look I think initially we could say that we import the actual hybrid drive mechanisms themselves and assemble the vehicles here, but I think the funding would be conditional on at least one manufacturer, and perhaps Toyota since they are one of the most mature, producing the hybrid drive locally and the other manufacturers licensing that so that we can get as much local content as possible.

L: Yes. Tell me - you would know this - what proportion of car pollution comes from the normal combustion engine?

M: Yes, it's around 13% of our total global greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Within that there's private transport and we've also got . . . freight and things like that. They generally account for air travel and shipping separately, outside of that figure. It's very significant.

L: I know that sources within the car industry have put the cost of converting the manufacturing base over to hybrid drive at about $300 million, 30,000 firm orders for each of the established car manufacturers, a total of $1.2 billion. So we're talking big dollars.

M: Exactly. But already Rudd has been heard on the media saying that he's willing to spend $500 million establishing a clean car fund, but let's not do half the job, let's go with what the manufacturers require and go through the conversion process, because it's not like we need to do any more research. It's an established technology, it's ready to go, it's just whether a government here is going to support it and support the local industry and support those 100,000 jobs.

L: OK. Matthew, how much interest, given that we buy about a million cars a year new, how long would it take if we were going big time into the hybrid model, would it be before we made some really significant inroads into the business of global emissions from our motor vehicles?

M: Well I think the important thing is really to get the hybrid drive model going and then to promote the next step, which is called plug-in hybrids, and that's hybrid vehicles but they've got the engine back-up for long trips but all the short trips that everybody does, and that makes up a majority of our trips - they're the ones to the supermarket, the ones to take the kids to school - they all actually get powered from the power point at home and then hopefully we can have that power generated from renewable energy sources, which are getting a lot of support now around the world, and therefore we can reduce our emissions from the tailpipe by around 85%. But a combination of the hybrid drive, with battery storage and powered predominately by power from the grid for all short trips. This will make massive in-roads, there's a lot of potential here.

L: The only thing is, Matthew, we've spoken to motor writers in the last week or so who make the point that Australia, being a vast country, is a country where we drive significant distances, and the hybrid car for those sorts of journeys is not as good as it is for the short little trips where you put your foot on the brakes and you're charging the battery, for example, whereas when you're driving long distances the hybrid cars do not come into their own, they're actually more expensive to run.

M: They don't meet their average fuel consumption but they still come in under the big 6 cylinder vehicles that are currently manufactured in Australia. What you've got to realise is that the average trip length is about 8.5 kilometres, so the point is we can cut out all the average trips and make them purely on electricity from the grid and then for those longer drives you've got the motor there as a back-up and you can fuel it and significantly reduce our imports of fuel and we'll probably be able to be domestically satisfied from fuel production if we go down this road because we'll cut down our use significantly.

L: Matthew, thank you very much for joining us today. That's Matthew Wright from an organisation called Beyond Zero Emissions.