Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill 2008 will allow the application of new registration charges to the five per cent of heavy vehicles that are registered under the Australian government’s Federal Interstate Registration Scheme. Apparently there are some 21,500 trucks, out of a total of 470,000 trucks, that will fall under this registration scheme. Obviously all the states have their own registration, and this bill will affect five per cent of the total number of registered heavy vehicles across Australia. These changes were agreed to at the Australian Transport Council meeting in February this year, and the states and territories have already imposed these new charges because that is where most of the trucks are registered.

To give a bit of background on this proposal, the bills originally proposed earlier this year were blocked by the Liberals and Nationals in the Senate because the schedule of charges contained an annual adjustment component based on a road construction index—in other words, that index would have been a measure of the costs of building roads—and it would have resulted in a likely annual increase in these charges of some seven to eight per cent had that bill passed in its original form as proposed by the Labor government. Also, the government wanted to increase the road user charge from 19.633c per litre—that is the fuel excise that the trucking industry and heavy vehicle industry pay for every litre of fuel consumed—to 21c per litre from January next year. Once again, this would have been subject to an annual adjustment. If the Liberal and National parties had not been successful in blocking that bill in the Senate, we would have seen the reintroduction of a fuel excise indexation scheme, where fuel excise as it applies to the trucking industry would have been increased annually based on the CPI. The former coalition government rightly abolished the automatic indexation of fuel excise, but what we were going to see was this new stealth tax, not announced by the now Prime Minister to the trucking industry prior to the last federal election—an increase in tax on the very transport sector that is so vital to the health and wealth of all Australians.

We do not oppose this second form of the bill, but we still have some concerns. We will propose amendments, and we want to see this government accept our amendments, because we want to make sure that the government cannot automatically index the road user charge by a formula. Our amendments would mean that the government must submit any of those proposed increases in charges to the scrutiny of the parliament. When a new tax is imposed on an industry—in this case the trucking industry—I think any fair-minded Australian would agree that that should really have the scrutiny of the parliament, and that is what our amendments would seek to ensure. We want to make sure that the charge is open, that there is a transparent process to the establishment of any increases that the government would want to propose in the future and that part of this fuel excise increase that the government would have the ability to make should this bill pass in its amended form goes to the construction of truck rest stops across the AusLink network. I have a very significant interest in truck stops. My electorate of Maranoa is of some 560,000-odd square kilometres and has major arterial roads. The Warrego, Gore, Cunningham and D’Aguilar highways are all major arterial roads that lead from Brisbane through to Darwin, Adelaide, Melbourne or Sydney. We know that the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government and the government have responded to our concerns on this side of the House, but we want to make sure that this bill removes that link between the road user charge and the indexation and leaves the matter of adjustment to future regulation and the scrutiny of the parliament. So we will certainly be watching very closely, should this bill pass with our amendments, to make sure that the process is open and transparent and that the parliament is able to scrutinise any proposed increases in the fuel excise.

Currently, the government may make a regulation that contains an indexing formula, which means that, should a regulation pass this parliament, the charge would increase every year without the opportunity for parliamentary debate or disallowance. Our proposed amendment would require the increase to the road user charge to be passed by the parliament. One of the concerns I have, of course, with the establishment of this road user charge is the fact that, whilst it will go towards establishing rest stops on our major arterial highways, it will not put any money into those roads that are not on the AusLink network. I notice the Minister for Resources and Energy is at the table. I have large networks of roads in my electorate that go into the resources sector, which I know he would have a very keen interest in. All of those industries out there in the Cooper Basin, the Eromanga oil and gas basin and the Surat Coal Basin, including the beef industry, are significant contributors to the national wealth. They will not see any of that money going to those roads for truck stops.

I will give you a little example, Mr Deputy Speaker. I was recently out at Birdsville in the back of my electorate. It is some 400 kilometres through the Cooper Basin and through to Windorah before you start to get onto a sealed highway. On the way back, I went into the Cuddapan oil refinery. Almost daily they truck out oil—a vital product in this day and age—for processing further east. They bring that out on type 2 road trains. A type 2 road train has three trailers and carries a very heavy load. They are pulling that out on a gravel road for the first hundred or so kilometres, and then they have another 250 kilometres into Quilpie, for example. But it is still not a road that will get any truck stops. They then have to go from Quilpie to Charleville before they get anywhere near an AusLink highway, another 200-odd kilometres. The point I raise here is that those trucks that are coming in and out of the resource rich Cooper Basin and Eromanga Basin will also be paying—they pay it today—the fuel excise. They continually ask me when the money that they pay in fuel excise is coming to benefit their roads in the outback of my electorate. Many of those fully laden type 2 road trains—whether it is with oil, with equipment for the exploration of oil and gas in the Cooper Basin or with cattle for export into meatworks in the processing sector and, of course, into the feedlot industry—will be using two litres of fuel per every kilometre. So you can start to see how any increase in tax will impact on those industries and those truck operators without any benefit being returned to the roads on which they have to operate.

The electorate of Maranoa really is a powerhouse for the Australian economy. I mentioned the oil and gas industry in the Cooper Basin and the Eromanga Basin, but we also have the Surat Coal Basin further east in between Dalby and Roma. That is really in its developmental infancy. We know it is a great resource. I am sure the minister is aware of the potential of the coal seam methane in that area. Power generation using natural gas is a very clean source of energy. Power stations are being developed and built as we speak, but that also requires trucks to come in and out loaded with equipment to construct the new power stations or powerlines to feed into the national grid. We have one just west of Dalby—there is going to be a base load, gas-fired power station at Braemar. There is another one near Miles going in for Queensland Gas using coal seam methane as one of their sources. This is all putting additional pressure on the Warrego. I met yesterday with members of an energy company, Linc Energy, who are using the resource of fairly deep coal—it is not economic to mine that coal for the quality of the coal that is there.

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