Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008. As someone from one of the pioneering cartage contracting and road transport families in the south-west of Western Australia, I am very well aware of the importance of AusLink and road-funding programs, as well as the issues facing those in the transport industry. My father was the very first milk carter for the Peters and Brownes factory in Brunswick Junction, and my early experience was in a five-tonne 1948 Diamond T truck carting TD-6 and TD-9 tractors up the Collie Hill and carting Worsley sand down the Collie Hill. This was followed by time in a 12-tonne International BCF-180 truck that carted just about everything, followed by a 27-tonne Mack, White Fords and now the road trains, the Aeromax and the Louisville. The majority of this time was on roads right throughout the south-west. As a result of this, I would like to recognise and congratulate the many local shires and city councils around Australia, especially the 11 shire councils in my electorate of Forrest, that plan, implement, manage and administer the federal government’s Roads to Recovery program.

The Roads to Recovery program—first established in 2000 under the previous coalition government and, since 2005, one of the components of AusLink—has proven to be a very popular, practical program. Councils view this program as an essential element in assisting local government’s ability to maintain and upgrade the local roads network. Indeed, all local government authorities have accepted the Roads to Recovery program as the mainstay of their roads programs. Grants provided under the Roads to Recovery program are intended to supplement, not substitute for, council road spending.

The previous coalition government ensured that grants were provided directly to local councils and not filtered through state governments, to ensure all Roads to Recovery funds were indeed received by all councils. This was a direct, practical process to deliver federal government funds to communities—on the ground, where it is needed—a process relied on by local councils, particularly those with a small rate base but with significant road networks within their shires. The Shire of Manjimup, in my electorate of Forrest, is just one example of a council fitting this particular demographic. However, there are many shires in regional Australia that are just like Manjimup. The councils themselves determine which roads will be upgraded and when the roads will be upgraded, according to their priority list. Councils have had unfettered choice as to how they spend their funds on roads within their own council boundaries.

But now it seems that the minister will be the one to sign off on who will receive funding. In fact, if this bill is enacted, the minister will be the one who determines if a council like Manjimup will receive funding and how much. I certainly will not endorse the decision-making process being taken away from individual councils by a Canberra-centric regime that has little idea of the significance of a road upgrade in the community of Walpole, in my electorate of Forrest, or even the tourist-cum-scenic forest road route through the Donnelly River area in the Manjimup shire. It is a Canberra-centric regime with certainly no understanding of the effect on the lives of Greenbushes residents of cancelling funding for no other purpose than to divert the funding to another project, for work on road-grading, bituminising or safety-proofing a lower grade road on a country regional bus route out in the back blocks of Greenbushes. It will matter. These decisions need to be made at the local council level.

In the 2006-07 year, the funding level for Roads to Recovery was $304 million. I am concerned that forward estimates have noted that funding has only been identified up to the 2011-12 year. However, the current government has clearly acknowledged the success of the Roads to Recovery program and indeed intends to extend the program for another five years, to 2014. I note that budget items 9 and 10 permit payments under the Roads to Recovery program to be made until 2014. The Roads to Recovery program has been a highly successful program, and over the life of the program allocation, the 11 local councils in my electorate have shared in over $16 million—almost 9.4 per cent of the Western Australian total allocation of $180 million.

My concerns now go to the technical amendments to the bill that aim to change the definition of a road in the AusLink (National Land Transport) Act 2005 to put beyond doubt that projects for the development of off-road heavy vehicle facilities used by trucks may be funded under the AusLink program. Facilities to be funded were announced by the government in February 2008 under the banner of a $70 million Heavy Vehicle Safety and Productivity Plan to improve roadside facilities for truck drivers, such as the construction of more heavy vehicle rest stops, decoupling areas along highways and on the outskirts of major cities, and trials of new electronic monitoring technology to monitor a truck driver’s work hours and vehicle speed—aimed at reducing driver fatigue and increasing driver safety.

At the same time as this announcement was made, we find that the Labor government had also decided to increase heavy vehicle registration fees and the effective rate of the diesel fuel excise by introducing the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill 2008 and the Road Transport Charges (Australian Capital Territory) Repeal Bill 2008. Significant increases to the heavy vehicle registration charges were to be implemented over three years from 1 July 2008, resulting from the application of an annual road cost adjustment formula—a formula that would result in charges higher than the CPI. From 1 January 2009 the road user charge would increase from 19.633c to 21c per litre and would be indexed annually thereafter to the same formula as that used for registration charges.

I spoke in this House, voicing my opposition to these bills, as these two measures would have imposed an increasing cost burden on Australia’s struggling truck operators and their families. With some 75 per cent of Australia’s domestic freight carried on the back of a truck, including the majority of items on the shelves of regional, rural and remote supermarkets, the flow-on effect of increased prices will ultimately be passed on to all consumers. Obviously any cost increases to transported goods increase the cost of living and will also hit regional Australia very hard, particularly regional Western Australia. Those living in regional Australia and those in the transport industry have benefited from both of these increases having since been rejected by my opposition colleagues in the Senate.

We are committed to protecting Australia from yet another round of inflationary tax rises at a time of higher cost-of-living pressures, including those same grocery prices that the Prime Minister promised to reduce during the election campaign. However, this particular $70 million funding package can only go ahead if the Senate agrees to pass the increase in heavy vehicle registration, as the $70 million package has been budgeted from the revenues this measure will collect. It is ironic that, on the one hand, the Rudd Labor government wishes to raise taxes on diesel fuel used by trucks and the transport industry and, on the other hand, provide the sector with a rebate under the proposed carbon pollution scheme.

The Rudd government is claiming that the opposition, Australia’s alternative government, is putting the safety of truck drivers at risk by rejecting the 2007 heavy vehicle charges determination. That is simply not true. This is just another Labor government tax. This Labor government is a high-taxing government and ultimately all increases in pricing will be passed onto consumers.

There is no doubt that many owner-operators and small trucking businesses are doing it tough. Most truck drivers have been and still are working overtime to absorb the extra costs they incur with the recent surges in the price of fuels. Not all of them can pass on these extra costs in a contemporaneous manner. Many drivers are locked into contracts which can have as long as three- or five-year terms with no capacity to pass on cost increases. It has even been alleged that larger supermarket corporations are exacerbating driver fatigue and taking unfair advantage of truck drivers, as they are being used as free warehouse storage facilities by being forced to wait long periods for their cargoes to be unloaded. In the case of refrigerated loads, the additional cost to the truck owners is significant. Tim Eaton, of National Trucking, said on Lateline recently: ‘Woolies are bullies.’

Many truckies have reached breaking point and have exited the industry—indeed, I have been told that there were 3,600 repossessions of trucks in the first six months of this year. We have all the economic indicators that show people are losing jobs and growth is slowing. Inflation is going to be higher under the Rudd government and this will adversely affect those involved in the trucking industry. The costs of registration and diesel, the behaviour of contractors and the attitude of the major retailers all add to the pressures on the trucking industry—and many of these are family owned businesses.

The trucking industry has long accepted the principle of paying its way. All moneys currently collected under the Federal Interstate Registration Scheme are paid to the states and territories. As I have previously said, once the proposed measures are fully implemented, the revenue of states and territories will increase by a further $168 million annually. I would like to know exactly how much each state and territory government has already invested back into roads from the revenue they are currently receiving. And where are the guarantees and the audit processes to ensure that the states and territories will actually spend the proposed revenue windfall on roads, in particular on facilities to assist heavy vehicles? Who will pay for these audit processes?

Truck drivers already know that there are not enough rest stops. In fact, the logbooks used in the eastern states that show that drivers have exceeded their driving hours do not take into account that, when they try and pull up at a rest stop, they invariably find that it is full and the drivers have no alternative but to keep driving, sometimes for an extra hour or more, before they can safely pull off the road into the next vacant rest stop. Mr Speaker, the government’s proposed $70 million—

See this speech in context