Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is happening this week, according to the minister. We are able to move large quantities of defence equipment very quickly from the Far North down to the south when it needs to be repaired and put together and up to the north when it needs to be deployed. For many years when I was in the Northern Territory the problems caused by the difficulties associated with moving equipment backwards and forwards to Darwin and those remote areas was of concern to the military units based in Darwin, and what should happen in the event of the need to rapidly deploy in an emergency situation.

The laws of our country need to be prepared to enable that deployment and to support it. This legislation puts some limits on our immunity from state law when it comes to moving this equipment. I might say that it is not just Australian military equipment that gets moved about our country. We have on occasions the Singapore armed forces undergoing training at the Shoalwater Bay training area, and approximately 300 armoured vehicles of various types can be located on the range at Shoalwater Bay.

The United States armed forces also come and exercise at the Shoalwater Bay training area. They bring their own equipment but, once again, it is very different from ours in some cases, and certainly different from the equipment of the Singaporean armed forces. On the face of it, if you look at any United States armed force unit you find that inevitably they have those Hummers that they buzz around in, and if you compare them in size and shape to your average Land Rover you find that the Hummer is a heck of a lot bigger and heavier. If you put them on a suburban street they do not really fit, and certainly not in an Australian environment. So all kinds of problems can emerge not only when we set about to move large quantities of our own equipment but when it is mixed in with large numbers of Hummers and other types of foreign equipment.

Elsewhere in the Northern Territory is the Delamere weapons range, and we can have on occasion substantial numbers of foreign troops located at RAAF Tindal. Those troops come with their own knowledge of road rules, and it can mean that special efforts have to be made to make sure that they are not offending the traffic rules or the swift and smooth flow of civilian traffic while they are undergoing their training activities.

There are some interesting versions of equipment that we see from time to time in Australia. It is worth just canvassing some of the differences that apply. I have done a bit of digging and, with the help of the Parliamentary Library and other places, I have found some interesting examples. There are tanks such as the M1 Abrams. It is a huge and heavy piece of equipment used by US forces and also soon to be used by our own forces. There is also, in the case of the Singaporean armed forces, the AMX13 light tank.

Armed recovery vehicles, often fitted with cranes and even bulldozer blades, can sometimes be deployed wherever armoured vehicles are used for military training exercises. These are often sent out onto our roads on low-loaders, but it is important that from time to time, when they are required to use the roads, we have a suitable set of arrangements for them to do so.

There are ASLAVs—those wonderful vehicles that you and I travelled in, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie, and which we were very much impressed by in their operations in Iraq. They too make excursions onto Australian roads regularly, particularly around their garrison site in Darwin and between there and training areas such as the one out at Mount Bundy on the Kakadu National Park boundary, where I have been many times prior to it being declared a training area. It is very rough and inhospitable country in there, but to get there and back the ASLAVs go up and down the Stuart Highway and out on the Kakadu Highway as well.

As we have seen, ASLAVs come in a range of shapes and sizes. We have even seen them with huge fences on them, used to stop projectiles, to force the projectiles to explode early should they be fired at the ASLAVs. They are very effective. But when they go on those vehicles, that kind of additional equipment massively changes their dimensions. It has a huge impact on the ability of the ASLAVs to operate in traffic. As we ourselves found out in Iraq, the soldiers who are operating those kinds of equipment choose to remove it from time to time to facilitate their flow through the traffic. Obviously, in having them out on Australian roads, we need to consider their physical dimensions.

One of the most important physical dimensions in this debate is the weight of vehicles. I have looked up some bits of equipment. A Leopard 1 main battle tank weighs 42 tonnes and can travel at only 62 kilometres an hour. Its width is 3.37 metres. That is quite a size and shape. An M113 armoured personnel carrier weighs 10.9 tonnes and is 4.86 metres long. It travels at 65 kilometres an hour. The ASLAVs, as we have seen, can go at 100 kilometres an hour, but, as I say, that depends on their size and shape, and just how big their dimensions are depends on whether they have the fences on. We have also seen the Bushmaster. The Bushmaster can travel even faster, but it also has quite a weight. In its combat configuration it weighs 14 tonnes. These are large vehicles and they need to be carefully administered.

I want to mention one of the more exotic types of vehicle I managed to find, with the assistance of the library, going through the types of vehicles produced by Australian Defence Industries in our country. I do not know if many members know this, but there is a vehicle produced which is truly exotic, called the ADI high-speed engineering vehicle. It is basically a backhoe that travels at 100 kilometres an hour. I do not know what I would do if I was confronted by a backhoe doing 100 kilometres an hour down the Ipswich Motorway. I think I would panic. I think there would be a problem. It just shows that military vehicles have other purposes than just their efficacious use in traffic. They can sometimes be extremely exotic. A backhoe like that is something that does need to be carefully operated by the military when they set out to use it on Australian roads.

I said before that one of the most important issues of dimension is weight. One of the reasons we are seeking to limit the exposure or the immunity of the defence forces from state law is that it can be truly damaging if we send out heavy vehicles and they exceed the mass limits on the bridges, for example, that they traverse over. This is an issue that is quite well known to me because at the moment the Ipswich Motorway—a road of great interest to me in my area and that my residents use all the time—contains something like 52 bridges in its 19-kilometre length. It is being traversed by up to 100,000 vehicles a day, and often those vehicles exceed the construction design capabilities of the bridges on the Ipswich Motorway. It is one of the issues that has caused the state government to look at various ways to try and replace the Ipswich Motorway, but at the moment we have vehicles using that road that are theoretically too heavy for the bridges they are using. They are operating under dispensation. I am talking about B-doubles on the Ipswich Motorway.

That is happening in many cases across Australia because the size of our transports are getting bigger and bigger and their weight, their mass, is increasing. Governments have to look at whether they can give dispensation to use bridges that in the past would not have been expected to carry vehicles of that size. I am particularly interested in the Ipswich Motorway question because you get vehicles using that road—and I am not talking military vehicles here; I am talking about thousands of B-doubles using that road every day. While it is important that we limit the immunity of the Defence Force to such things—basically, when you look at some of the field guns that are operated by the Australian Defence Force, when they are connected to a Mack prime mover, as they regularly are, and they are sent out onto the road to be redeployed they can be bigger and longer than a semitrailer. To an average motorist that can be quite distracting; they can be an extremely large unit. But at the moment the same states that would seek us to exempt our army vehicles, to limit our exemption from their rules in relation to weight, are making regular transgressions in relation to a whole lot of other bridges—allowing them to use pieces of road, even though the vehicles are too heavy for the bridges that they are likely to encounter.

Another issue that comes into play here is the various rules that apply to operators seeking to drive their trucks interstate. I have encountered this with one of my local trucking operators—Nolans—which has run into a lot of difficulty with the operation of B-doubles and semitrailers interstate. They are not the only ones; there are a lot of people encountering this difficulty. If you look at a B-double or a semitrailer these days, quite often they will have a refrigeration unit stuck on the front of the trailer, and in some states when they look at the dimensions allowable for semitrailers they will incorporate the refrigeration units and in other states they will not. I know personally, having spoken to Terry Nolan about this, that Nolans Interstate Transport has encountered cases where its trucks have crossed over a border somewhere along a trip between, say, Brisbane and Melbourne, and the next minute some guy jumps out of the bushes and says: ‘Aha! You have transgressed the law. We’ve got you. You have broken the rule in relation to our state because it’s slightly different from that other state you just came from.’

These kinds of differences between states are silly and they continue to develop, in their bureaucratic administration of these kinds of things, more and more hurdles for the operators of transport trying to move our freight backwards and forwards. Down the track surely we need to look at standardisation. It has been said many times. It is the rail gauge debate again and again and again, and we are getting it more and more and more. Even if you go state to state, within the states themselves there are many different rules about roads you can drive on and roads you cannot drive on and roads where, if you are driving a B-double, you have to have a flashing light, but other roads where you do not have to have a flashing light. There are different requirements that apply backwards and forwards.

Our defence forces have to worry not just about going across state boundaries and the differences in laws that apply between states but about such things as what configurations you can drive on the road between Winton and Longreach and whether that rule is different from what might apply further down the track. When you travel from Winton to Longreach and further on down the road into New South Wales, I am sure you will find that a totally different set of rules apply. We obviously need that dispensation, but I would like people to consider the wider ramifications. Surely we can do something to more readily propagate agreement and an outbreak of peace between the states about what the rules should be. We need an end to the flood of paperwork backwards and forwards that drives truck drivers up the wall and really only adds costs for the people who are seeking to ship stuff backwards and forwards. As we consider this, we need to look at that wider question and, where possible, make a bid for standardisation.

I have with me the guidelines for multicombination vehicles in Queensland and the New South Wales RTA vehicle standards information. They are completely different documents and, if you merged them together, there are bound to be tears. They do not quite fit. But the more that can be done to bring those together in the service of commerce in Australia, better traffic flow and reducing the blood pressure of the many hard-working truck drivers who have to deal with this kind of stuff the better. We should be seeking standardisation for those commercial operators, just as we seek greater standardisation and the more sensible flow of data backwards and forwards in support of the flow of our military vehicles.

I strongly support this legislation. It is important that we have traffic flows that readily support our defence forces and get rid of those old problems that used to be a nightmare for commanders in forward bases such as Darwin in respect of the logistics when they needed to press the button to quickly move equipment back and forward. We are overcoming those problems, but more needs to be done. We need to remember that the defence forces provide an essential service to our nation and they need to be facilitated.

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