Nobody owns the EV charger problem—and Australia's paying for it
Australia's EV charging network is growing fast and nobody is in charge of it — but the fix might not be what the experts are recommending.
Nobody owns the EV charger problem — and Australia's paying for it
Australia has 23% of new car sales going to battery EVs, a grid that can theoretically power them, and a public charging network that nobody is actually responsible for. The result is what you'd expect: rapid growth, real gaps, and a user experience that still feels, for many drivers, like beta software deployed on public roads.
The Conversation piece published this week by Swinburne's Hussein Dia lays out the fragmentation clearly. More than 1,300 public charging sites, 4,000-plus ports, no single authority, and a patchwork of state grants, federal corridor funding, local council trials, and competing private operators who often require separate apps just to pay. Chargefox alone runs 83% of public chargers in Tasmania and 58% in Western Australia, meaning one network outage could effectively strand EV drivers across an entire state. That is a real vulnerability.
Dia's proposed remedy is a coordinating authority — a body to set interoperability standards, enforce reliability minimums, and publish open real-time data on charger availability. His argument is that competition can build the network but coordination is what makes it usable.
That second part is worth taking seriously. But the first part cuts against the conclusion he draws from it.
Private capital builds better networks than mandates
Look at what private capital actually built in the United States when it had a clear commercial incentive and room to operate. Tesla's Supercharger network, built without a government mandate, became the gold standard for EV charging on earth. Reliable, fast, nationally coherent, and — critically — open to non-Tesla vehicles since 2023, which it moved to not because regulators forced it but because opening the network was commercially attractive. The Biden administration's National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure programme spent billions trying to do what Tesla had already done, and produced a rollout that, by 2024, had delivered far fewer working chargers than promised, with reliability rates that embarrassed the programme's architects. The coordinated federal effort underperformed the decentralised commercial one by almost every measure.
The moment a government agency becomes responsible for building and operating the thing, the incentive to make it actually work for users competes permanently with the incentive to make it look like it is working for voters.
Australia's own experience with government-coordinated infrastructure at scale should give anyone pause. The NBN is the obvious reference point: a project where political decision-making replaced commercial decision-making at every major junction, from technology choice to rollout priorities to pricing structure. The engineering was not the problem. The problem was that $50 billion of infrastructure was managed as a political instrument rather than a commercial one. The lesson is not that infrastructure coordination is impossible. It is that the moment a government agency becomes responsible for building and operating the thing, the incentive to make it actually work for users competes permanently with the incentive to make it look like it is working for voters.
The coordination problem is narrower than it looks
None of which means the current state of Australian EV charging is fine. It is not. The interoperability problem — different apps, different accounts, incompatible payment systems — is a genuine consumer friction that the market has been slow to self-solve, partly because network operators have rational incentives to keep users locked to their own ecosystem. That is a textbook case for a light regulatory intervention: mandate a common payment standard, require real-time availability data to be published in an open format, and set minimum uptime thresholds. These are rules, not an operator. There is a meaningful difference.
The regional gap problem is also real, but its cause is simpler than the coordination story suggests. Remote and rural charging routes are commercially marginal. Operators do not build there because the return is uncertain. The appropriate response is targeted subsidy for specific gaps — identified corridors where private investment will not arrive on its own — not a wholesale transfer of network responsibility to a government body that will then face all the same questions about where to build, at higher cost and lower speed.
The European model is about rules, not operators
The Netherlands and Norway examples Dia cites are instructive, though not in the way the piece implies. Both countries achieved high charger density not through centralised operation but through clear rules — the right to install a charger in your apartment building's car park, street-level infrastructure access, consistent standards — that allowed private and semi-private investment to flow efficiently. The framework was public. The execution was not.
Australia can get this right. The template is not a new authority building a national network. It is a clear, narrow set of standards that lets the operators already in the market compete on quality rather than lock-in, and targeted public investment for the corridors where competition will not reach on its own. Keep the government's hand on the rule book. Keep it off the charging cable.
Sources
The Conversation — The NBN: how a national infrastructure dream fell short
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Australia's EV charging network so fragmented?
Australia has no single authority responsible for its public charging network. Instead, it operates through a patchwork of state grants, federal corridor funding, local council trials, and competing private operators — many of which require separate apps and accounts just to pay for a charge.
What happened when the US government tried to build a national EV charging network?
The Biden administration's National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure programme spent billions of dollars but by 2024 had delivered far fewer working chargers than promised, with reliability rates that fell well short of targets. Tesla's privately built Supercharger network, developed without a government mandate, had already set the global standard for reliability and national coverage.
Why don't EV chargers get built in regional and rural Australia?
Remote and rural charging routes are commercially marginal — operators cannot be confident of a return on investment in low-traffic corridors. The market will not solve this on its own, which is why targeted public subsidies for specific identified gaps are the appropriate tool, rather than a government-run national network.
How did Norway and the Netherlands build such dense EV charging networks?
Neither country achieved high charger density through centralised government operation. Both established clear rules — including the right to install chargers in apartment car parks and consistent access to street-level infrastructure — that allowed private and semi-private investment to flow efficiently. The framework was public; the execution was not.
What would actually fix Australia's EV charging interoperability problem?
Mandating a common payment standard, requiring real-time charger availability data to be published in an open format, and setting minimum uptime thresholds would address the core consumer friction without creating a government-operated network. These are rules, not an operator — and the distinction matters for both cost and incentive structure.