Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great honour to speak to the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill and, in particular, about experiences I have recently had directly with the trucking industry. The bill does two principal things. Firstly, it extends the Roads to Recovery program, which was one of the many excellent Howard government initiatives. It put more resources directly into the hands of local government, particularly for the maintenance of important local roads. Secondly, the bill amends the AusLink legislation to allow AusLink to fund and support off-road rest stops. Members on this side of the House know that they are a bugbear for people in the transport industry.

I pay special tribute to Australia’s truck drivers, owner-operators and the men, and increasingly the women, in the industry. Too often many Australians, particularly those who live in built-up city areas, do not appreciate the sacrifices that are made to get our goods transported literally the length and breadth of this country.

In the last financial year, 2006-07, road freight was worth just under $17 billion to the Australian economy. That is 1.7 per cent of the entire nation’s gross domestic product. If you add storage, you are looking at closer to $30 billion or three per cent of Australia’s GDP. There were 2.1 billion tonnes of freight carried last year—2.1 billion tonnes of freight carried right across Australia—by Australia’s transport industry and, of course, our drivers. And it is forecast that, from 2000 to 2020, that tonnage is going to double. When you think about it, there is really nothing in this country that these people do not deliver—with the possible exception of babies!

In 1996, when the Howard government came to office, road funding was less in real terms than it had been at the time of the change of the previous government in 1982-83. In other words, the record of the last Labor administration, the last Labor government, was to actually reduce in real terms funding to Australian roads. In contrast, under the previous coalition government, there had been a 24 per cent real increase by 2007. So there was a real reduction under the previous Labor government and a real increase of 24 per cent under the last coalition government. Much of that money was invested in national highways but about 80 per cent of it actually went into local councils—bypassing the seriously constipated state governments mismanaging their resources and going instead to local governments, which know exactly which roads have to be fixed, which roads have to be built and which roads best serve the local communities.

In 2000 the Roads to Recovery program was budgeted at $1.2 billion over four years and it funded 25,000 projects, including in my electorate of Bradfield, in a built-up suburban Sydney area, right through to the most remote regional communities, including in your own electorate of Maranoa, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott. An issue that is very important to all Australians—particularly to the drivers but to all of us who use the roads—is road deaths. There were 10.76 deaths per 100,000 in 1996. So for every 100,000 Australians almost 11 Australians were killed. In contrast, by the time of the change of government last year, as a result of a range of initiatives, the number of deaths had declined from 11 per 100,000 to 7.6 per 100,000. I think everybody in the industry, the federal, state and local governments, the designers of vehicles and a whole variety of people should take an enormous amount of credit for that. The deaths that involved articulated trucks had declined over the last 11 years by some 11 per cent.

One thing that was done by the previous government was to reintroduce the Black Spot Program. It is estimated that, by June 2008, the Black Spot Program will have prevented some 6,000 serious crashes and saved in the order of 130 lives. So the end result is that one of the programs which we initiated in this parliament and which we fund and which we support has saved 130 lives. And, as a matter of record, it was a program that was scrapped by the Labor Party. There were 172 deaths last year involving articulated trucks.

There are a couple of things that the new Labor government has done already to which we on this side take great exception—as do people in the industry. Firstly, in an environment where this country has gone backwards under the Rudd Labor government—where Australians now are worse off than they were in 2007, with crippling increases in fuel, groceries and rents and increasing cost-of-living pressures—one of the things that the government did was to increase the road user charge. In plain language that is understood by the truckies of the country, what the government did was to increase the cost of the charge on diesel from 19.6c a litre to 21c a litre. That will raise $80 million a year. That is an $80 million tax on the industry—at a time when every motorist and, in particular, every truck driver and owner-operator knows that diesel costs are crippling them and adding to inflationary costs.

We are told by the government that it is fighting a war against inflation. We are told by the government that the price of groceries is something about which it professes to have concern. You would think that, if you were concerned about the cost of fuel to, in particular, Australian truckies, the last thing you would do is put an increased tax on diesel. Yet that was one of the first things that this government did. You would think that, if you were worried about the cost of groceries, instead of just watching the price of groceries, the last thing you would do is put inflationary costs onto it. It does not matter whether you go to a small independent grocer, a corner store or a supermarket, wherever you buy groceries, a truck driver somewhere drove those groceries to that facility and the cost of getting it there contributes to the price that real consumers ultimately pay.

So that was the first thing the government did: they increased the road user cost. They increased the cost of diesel and thereby, of course, increased the price of groceries to Australians. I bet we will not be hearing about that on the ‘grocery watch’ website that the taxpayers of Australia have paid $13 million to set up. That increase in the road user cost raises $80 million a year. So that is an $80 million tax on Australia’s owner-drivers—$80 million a year. The second thing the government did, in its enormous wisdom, was to increase the registration costs. So now we have an $89 million impost in increased registration charges. We are supposed to be fighting inflation, we are supposed to be worried about the cost of groceries and doing something about it, and the government’s first two actions were, firstly, to increase the price of diesel for truckies and, secondly, to increase the cost of registering the vehicles.

We were told that the registration charges were necessary to fund safety programs. No-one on this side opposes safety programs, but I ask: why is it that, with escalating cost-of-living pressures, rising interest rates under Mr Rudd and his government and people losing their jobs, we have to fund safety from an increased tax on Australia’s truckies instead of funding it out of the $21.7 billion surplus given to the government by the previous coalition government? When we oppose the registration costs, the government says, ‘We’ve got to fund safety.’ In other words, the government is saying that, if you do not increase taxes, you will not have funding for safety. What a load of nonsense! We were not born yesterday, and I can tell you that the truckies of this country—if they know what is going on—certainly know that this is a government that is hostile to the interests of everyday Australians and, in particular, fair dinkum, hardworking Australians who work on average about 100 hours a week driving this stuff around the country.

I had the great privilege—and that is how I describe it—of being able to spend 12 hours in a B-double weighing just over 60 tonnes with a guy called Rod Hannifey, who has seven kids. We went from Melbourne to Dubbo over approximately a 12-hour period. During that period of time, apart from getting to know Mr Hannifey very well, getting to know the issues of the drivers and getting to listen to a bit of Slim Dusty as we went along, I had the very important opportunity to get a better understanding of the issues that are facing these men and women in this industry. We stopped in Albury and I was met by the member for Farrer, who brought out a welcoming committee. We also stopped in Forbes at the Ben Hall Road Stop—and I send a very big cheerio to Carmel. There were a dozen or so truckies at the Ben Hall when we pulled in to Dubbo at about eight o’clock that night. If you are looking for a high-quality meal, particularly rissoles about four centimetres thick, you will pay $11.50 for two rissoles, salad, chips and a free coffee, and you will get the best company you could ever spend a bit of time with. I will not relate to the Prime Minister the reaction of the truckies when they saw him pop up on the TV in the corner of the truck stop. Needless to say, it was not dissimilar from the cheerio he got from the crowd at the Bledisloe on Saturday night.

There are a number of very important issues here. We had an opportunity to look at rest stops. For those of us who just drive around the country in our cars and stop every couple of hours to have a coffee and to freshen up, a rest stop is a rest stop. But, for a driver driving a 60-tonne B-double, an articulated vehicle, or, increasingly, a triple, these rest stops are absolutely essential. These men and women need a rest. All drivers need a rest, but these people need to be able to sleep. They have an enormous amount of responsibility in driving these vehicles. It is not unusual for a driver to be waiting for three or four days to get a call from a company, to get a call and then to find that he is going to be on the road for 10 days and will go through four states through that period of time. So, when a driver pulls in for a rest stop, he needs a break. Some of the rest stops are very well designed with parking that is clearly demarcated, with the trucks further off the road and with the refrigerated trucks being kept away from the non-refrigerated trucks because the engines in the refrigeration, of course, keep the drivers awake. Whilst technically they might have had a four-hour break, a driver can get back onto the road really having had no sleep at all.

Some of the rest stops have showers. Some of them have toilets that are well designed and all the rest of it, but some of them are appalling. Some of them are not only a disgrace but indeed a threat to the safety of all road users—just a bit of dirt on the side of the road with a rubbish tin and maybe a bench if you are lucky. There is no shade, trees have been chopped down and there has been no thought given to drivers driving in 40-degree heat needing to get a bit of sleep in shaded conditions—there is none of that. One of the things that hopefully this bill and this amendment will help to achieve but which political will will ultimately deliver is truck stops that are designed by drivers for drivers.

When you go over a hump in a car, you might barely notice it. If you are in a B-double and you go over a hump at 100 kilometres an hour, it is like an F18 lift-off. I commend the Queensland Department of Main Roads for what they have done with Mr Hannifey. They have put a GPS link computer system into his truck so that, when he goes over a road that has a defect that potentially threatens the safety of the truck and other road users, he can immediately lock it in and go straight to Queensland Roads, and within a very short space of time they will send a road crew out to fix it. That is in everybody’s interests. However, trying to deal with the RTA in New South Wales is quite a different matter. It takes quite a few calls. The roads minister has had a bit of a problem, but—

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