My jaw dropped. Our new BOVAG chair was on WNL on Sunday morning. Her message? “No, an excise duty reduction really isn’t necessary. No, just provide targeted support. Because an excise duty cut of 10 cents would just so easily cost the government a billion euros, and that’s not possible in these times!”

Who are we here for?

Excuse me? On whose behalf are we actually speaking here? For the government, or for motoring Netherlands, which can use every windfall it gets? Imagine being a BOVAG member with a petrol station in the border region, while your chair says this because the money for the government is more important than the survival of your business and the interests of your customers. Because the difference is apparently too big, BOVAG seems to think, so we give up.

It shouldn’t interest BOVAG or us in the slightest whether an excise duty reduction costs a billion, and certainly not how the government would supposedly have to pay for it. Worse still: I don’t hear a single journalist ask: “But hang on a minute, with those high fuel prices, isn’t the government actually benefiting extra from higher excise duty revenues and additional VAT revenues? So how does a temporary excise duty reduction cost a billion? Because it’s been agreed that windfalls end up in a different pot, and that a ‘reduction’ has to be paid for from somewhere else? Is that why we simply leave the motorist out in the cold, while in virtually all the countries around us a helping hand is extended?

I don’t get it!

Really, I don’t understand any of it. How tame we’ve become, how bad we are at lobbying, and the fact that we as BOVAG nowadays mainly want to be a dialogue partner for a government that time and again proves unreliable. Why don’t we just stand for something, and keep standing for it, even when the government doesn’t side with us on it? Because what has that lobbying actually gained us over the past few years? Certainly no consistent policy, no clear vision on mobility and taxation, other than that it always has to be more.

I’m clear about it: the government should make its own cutbacks and dare to make choices, instead of only accepting windfalls and dismissing the so-called setback — such as that excise duty reduction of just 10 cents — as an enormous and insurmountable obstacle. And they do so in such a way that even our trade association doesn’t want to fight for that reduction. It’s too ridiculous for words.