Ute Man is the Coalition’s favoured figurine but he’s a fraught mascot

This election is a life or death matter for one of Australian politics’ most enduring and powerful identities: Ute Man.

Of all the potent political icons invoked by vote-hungry politicians, none in the last decade has enjoyed quite the sway of Ute Man, our homo electus, the target audience for every politician ever to engage in hi-vis cosplay as polling day approached.

When Peter Dutton enjoined voters three weeks ago to think of the Coalition’s promised 25c petrol excise cut “as you fill up your ute”, it was Ute Man he had in mind, as did Anthony Albanese when he paused beer excise, a knock-off treat for Australia’s favourite battler.

Even for those who decry “identity politics”, Ute Man is a hard guy to quit, with his reassuring whiff of elbow-grease, his dislike of bullshit, his weekend caravanning and his proper job that can’t be done by Zoom.

Former PM Scott Morrison, in 2019, went so far as to declare the ute a formal Australian economic indicator.

“Every time an Australian sees a ute driving around a suburb of one of our metro areas or regional towns with a phone number on the side, that’s the sign of a stronger economy,” he avowed.

Even allowing for the fact that Morrison was later to self-identify as a bulldozer, that’s some strong stuff.

And Ute Man brought the 2019 election home for Morrison, thanks partially to his warning that Bill Shorten’s electric vehicle targets would “end the weekend”, obliging unhappy Ute Man to hitch his boat or caravan to some feeble electric alternative.

Election 2025, however, finds Ute Man standing at a new crossroads, squinting into the sunset, his trademark larrikin grin playing quizzically about his lips.

Australia is choosing big cars

For nearly a decade now, the number one best-selling vehicle in Australia has been a ute — the Toyota Hilux and the Ford Ranger having tussled between themselves for top spot since 2016. In 2023, the three top-selling models in Australia were all utes.

But a rearrangement is underway. The top-selling vehicle overall for the first three months of this year, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Indiustries, was a hybrid passenger vehicle — Toyota’s RAV4, whose sales doubled over the course of the 2024 calendar year in a barnstorming ascent.

And Labor’s new legislated vehicle emissions standards — which acquire teeth on July 1 — will penalise car manufacturers who sell only high-emissions vehicles (like the Hilux, the Ranger, or the biggest carbon-farter of them all, the LandCruiser).

Car companies — which until now have enjoyed an extremely permissive retail environment in Australia, where heretofore they have been welcome to sell vehicles so exultantly gas-guzzling that they’d make even American regulators blush — will face a choice. The companies can offer low-emissions alternatives as well, to cut their pollutant average across the range, or just merrily keep selling the high-emissions vehicles, and pass the penalties on to customers in the form of higher prices.

What are the major parties doing to Ute Man?

In an Albanese future, Ute Man will face tax and price incentives that strongly encourage him to consider a vehicle that emits less pollution, and costs less to run.

In a Dutton future, Ute Man will continue to drive what he likes, because the Coalition last week promised it would scrap the scheme’s financial penalties. Plus, Dutton will subsidise Ute Man’s petrol for a year.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Ute Man is flesh and blood! He’s an identity, not a handful of rational tax-related decisions! Ute Man cares not for tax lurks! Ute Man just wants to work hard, and tow his caravan! Ute Man drives a ute because he is ute! Not because of some nerdy accounting advice!

Look, this is a narratively-tempting approach, and it makes for good political ads.

But it’s not one based in fact. The truth is, if you take a good hard look at Ute Man, you discover that he’s not a real person at all. He’s two car salesmen and a tax accountant in a Driza-Bone, and I’m about to explain why.

First, a history lesson

Utes are a fertile driver of Aussie sentiment, for the simple reason that we invented them.

As legend has it, the Ford coupe utility was dreamed up 90 years ago by the company’s only Australian designer, a 23-year-old chap called Lew Bandt.

Bandt was inspired by a letter from a lady in Gippsland, who wrote to Ford outlining her farming family’s dilemma: they didn’t have enough money for two vehicles, and they needed “a car to go to church on Sunday, and a truck to take the pigs to market on Monday”. 

Bandt to the rescue! The rest is Aussie history; a timeless tale of a rugged nation’s love affair with a rugged vehicle, undimmed from then to now.

Realistically, though? That’s not even faintly true. Most of Australia’s automotive history is about our love affair with the passenger sedan.

In the late 1940s, we fell hard for the Austin A40 but our loyalties, for decades thereafter, swung principally between Holden and Ford. The FJ! The EH! The Kingswood! The Cortina! The Escort! The Torana! The Monaro! (Slight pause for the Datsun 120Y, during the oil crunch of the 1970s. Thank you for your economic service, friend.)

The Ford Falcon took the top spot for a bit, then came the long, long reign of the Holden Commodore, broken in the 2000s by the Toyota Corolla, which was in turn eclipsed by the Mazda 3 in the 2010s. All in all, the arc of the vehicular universe was long, but it bent toward smaller passenger vehicles.

Until 2016.

That’s when the Toyota Hilux became the first ute ever to hit number one. And then the top 10 got crowded with utes. And by 2023, Australia’s top three highest-selling vehicles were all utes, and all the rest were SUVs.

This is weird, because the Hilux had been around for donkey’s years. Did more Australians become farmers or tradies all of a sudden? Did the Deni Ute Muster do some particularly viral advertising in 2016? Hmmm. Tradie numbers weren’t spiking at the time, and Department of Agriculture records suggest that the agricultural workforce shrank by 20 per cent between 1996 and 2016, so that can’t be it.

More big cars without more tradies?

As The Australia Institute pointed out last year, there are now approximately 3.1 million utes in Australia, and 4.2 million SUVs. But only 1.9 million tradies.

And weekend boat needs don’t plug the gap. There are only 850,000 registered boat trailers and 770,000 caravans in Australia, and honestly many of these are parked in the unmetered parking areas in my street, and they never, ever move.

The rise of Big Ute has nothing to do with fishing or camping. The truth is more prosaic.

What happened a decade ago is that a constellation of tax policies made utes — all of a sudden — a very attractive option.

It was in 2015 that Morrison as Treasurer first unveiled the instant asset write-off, which made it easier for small businesses and sole traders to claim vehicles for work use.

Fringe benefits tax applied to work cars, but there were significant exemptions for light commercial vehicles capable of carrying one tonne or more.

Why would you buy a sedan, if a dual-cab ute could work as a deduction?

In addition, utes were exempted from the Luxury Car Tax, meaning that while a luxury sports car worth $80,000 or more would incur the tax, a Chevrolet monster truck wouldn’t.

And in the fevered COVID-19 years, the Temporary Full Expensing Scheme increased to $150,000 the amount of work-related assets a business could knock off their tax.

“Ute Beauty!” proclaimed the front page of the Daily Telegraph, when that budget measure was announced.

For a short period of time, loss carry-back provisions even entitled businesses to create retrospective losses in previous tax years and claim expenses back against tax already paid.

In these exciting times, it became — briefly — possible to buy a commercial vehicle using tax dollars you’d already paid.

The result? Peak Ute!

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So what happens now?

The Albanese government is retooling the tax system’s nudges for car buyers, issuing fringe benefits tax exemptions for electric vehicles in a scheme which has blown out by about 10 times its projected take-up, now costing about half a billion dollars a year in foregone revenue. 

And the new vehicle emissions standards from this year onwards supply something more substantial than a nudge. More of a hip-and-shoulder.

This year’s carbon emissions standards for light commercial vehicles are set at 210g/km, causing significant issues for today’s Toyota LandCruiser, which belches 281g/km. The Hilux and Ford Ranger hover at about 194g/km, so are less immediately menaced, but by 2029 the prescribed emissions for their vehicle class dive to 110g/km. This is still well above European levels, but significant enough to change the landscape in Australia.

The Coalition describes the new emissions standards as a “ute tax” and has warned that the nation’s favourite vehicles are likely to get more expensive, in some cases by thousands of dollars.

Dutton last week announced that he would maintain the new standards, but remove the financial penalties on manufacturers for breaching them.

The government responds that the new standards will encourage manufacturers to offer vehicles that are less polluting, and cheaper to run, in what translates to a win for air pollution, carbon emissions, and consumers’ fuel costs.

Our changing vehicular tastes over the last century suggest that Australians are extremely sensitive to changing economic and tax conditions.

If a certain set of such conditions is capable of creating Peak Ute, can a different set create a new national favourite vehicle? One with a plug?

If so, perhaps we can say goodbye to Ute Man, or at least to taking him quite so literally.

The truth is that Australia’s small business have-a-go heroes don’t all drive utes. And they’re not all men, either.

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