Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Transport is very much an important part of any rural electorate. It is also very important for the cities, because of the transporting of goods all across this country. In my electorate of Barker, we have some very large transport firms—for example, K&S Corporation and MacKenzie Freight Lines at Mount Gambier. Interestingly enough, both of them are about halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne. The transport industry is what really makes Australia tick. Without an efficient transport industry, we would not be able to get goods from A to B. We would not be able to get goods from the farms or the factories to the manufacturers and then to the wholesalers and retailers. It really is an important part of the Australian economy.

Reflecting that the new government’s main mantra is reducing inflation, we have seen stunts and suggestions they are going to reduce their expenditure on airfares by $15 million and take away $100 million in drought relief. Things like the rural apprentices program and the FarmBis program are all being cut. Unfortunately, most of these programs have been cut in rural areas, which, as a representative of a rural area, I find very concerning. In the scheme of things, they really do not cost all that much. The government will probably have a budget of something like $260 billion this year, so a few million here or there out of $260 billion is not all that much.

The government suggest that they are going to bring in a budget with a surplus of at least 1.5 per cent of GDP, which is not all that amazing, really, when you consider that the budget surplus last year was 1.6 per cent and the year before was 1.5 per cent. So to reach their goal of a surplus of 1.5 per cent of GDP is really not all that extraordinary. This is all aiming to fix up the bogeyman of inflation. I do not have a problem with any government trying to ensure that we do not allow inflation to get out of control, but what we have here is legislation under which fuel prices and registration costs for transport will actually go up, increasing Australia’s inflation rate. The Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill 2008 and related legislation will have a greater inflationary effect than any other bills brought before this parliament by the new government. It has been suggested to me that milk will ‘only’ go up 17c a litre. I think 17c a litre is just indicative of all the other food and grocery prices that will go up as a result of this legislation.

For example, B-doubles with three axles will incur nearly $6,000 in extra registration costs. A firm like Scott’s Transport in Mount Gambier would have at least 600 trucks. Six hundred trucks at $6,000 per truck is more than $3½ million each year. Those costs have to be passed on to the people who need to transport goods from the farms to the factories and from the factories to the retailers and wholesalers all around Australia. It will be a government induced inflationary cost. It will be a direct cost to the CPI and, as a result, it will have a pretty serious effect on inflation in this country. It is amazing that this government has not done some modelling to work out the extra costs on inflation caused by not only the CPI increases in fuel excise on trucks but also by this proposed act and the road user charges. It will be much higher than CPI because they will be using a different indicator. This bill increases the registration charges for heavy vehicles registered under the Federal Interstate Registration Scheme, or FIRS. These are heavy vehicles which transport goods interstate. Another problem with this is that it will deter transport operators from moving up to the B-doubles and road trains because the semis and the single- or double-axle trucks, the ordinary heavy lorries—for want of a better term—will not have those increased charges. So there will be disincentive to go to the more efficient B-doubles and road trains.

Transport is a major industry in my electorate of Barker, and the road network is a challenge across the whole region. The city of Mount Gambier, in my electorate, is situated midway between Melbourne and Adelaide and is the centre for a large transport industry—in fact, it is a transport hub. It is the transport hub for Scott’s Transport, K&S Freighters, South West Freight—SWF—and other trucking companies. All of Mount Gambier’s industries rely heavily on incoming or outgoing freight services, not only for what would be termed ‘traditional agricultural production’ but also for the very large forestry industry, which relies heavily on the transport industry. There is no capacity to move over to rail because railway lines cannot be moved very easily to different areas, so the truck industry will always be needed to service that industry. Transport is very much an expanding industry elsewhere in Barker. There is lots of heavy transport because of the wine grape industry, the timber industry, the wine tourism industry and the fish industry. Several hundred kilometres of coastline act as a boundary to my electorate, and there is a very large rock lobster and fishing industry. Whilst the Howard government investment in AusLink and Roads to Recovery improved the conditions of major roads of the electorate, a few years ago a road study of the south-east of South Australia reported a real need for future planning for roads in that area. The issue is not only the major interstate routes, as heavy vehicles need roads to the blue gum plantations—which are about to come on line and are all over the place—and providing a temporary road network, and one that is capable of carrying heavy vehicles, will always be a challenge.

Tourism is also a major industry in the electorate so another challenge is the integration of heavy transport and tourism, with the need to share the road network and to make it safe. That goes to the need to build bypasses such as we have in Millicent, which the Howard government provided funding for; the Worrolong Road bypass in Mount Gambier; and the proposed Penola bypass, which will pass right through the greatest industry in the country—the wine industry—and one of the greatest wine areas, the Coonawarra. It is very important that we do not have transport traffic interfering with the tourism industry because of safety problems. Anyone who has been through the Coonawarra will know that the existing trucks and the tourists can sometimes be a dangerous mixture.

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