Elderly motorist feels picked on

By Martin Johnston

Des Mahoney is cross about the $50 rise in car registration fees, which is mainly to cover road-crash injuries. He hasn't been in a car accident for 34 years.

Motorists will pay $207 to register their private vehicles from July 1. The increase is to cover a rise in the ACC levy which meets the cost of road accidents.

Mr Mahoney, aged 79, who lives at the Selwyn Retirement Village in Auckland, said motorists were easy prey for an ideological attack by the Minister of Transport, Maurice Williamson.

The former newspaper motoring editor said the increase would make it virtually impossible for pensioners to own a car unless they had some additional income.

Only some "small private means" would enable him and his wife to keep their 1987 Peugeot 505, which they used regularly for shopping, to visit family and for other outings.

From July 1 the ACC chunk of the fee rises from $101 to $148. The current one-off $18 safety-standards levy when cars are first registered changes to an annual $1.84 charge.

Registration fees for most other types of vehicles will rise in line with the increase for private cars, which includes a surcharge of $56 to pay for past ACC claims, and a premium of $92 to pay for new claims.

The Minister for ACC, Murray McCully, said the registration levy was increased rather than boosting petrol tax as the latter would have left ordinary motorists subsidising the owners of diesel vehicles - about 16 per cent of all vehicles.

But an Automobile Association spokesman, George Fairbairn, said that since the Government was intent on the unjustified rise in ACC income, it should have funded it by extending petrol tax to all fuels.