Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in this cognate debate to speak on the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008, the government’s second attempt at amending the Interstate Road Transport Charge Act 1985. The coalition blocked this bill the first time around, earlier in the year, because it had significant concerns. There are also areas of concern in this second attempt. First let me outline what the bill is about and why I have taken an interest in it.

The federal interstate road transport scheme began in 1987 to provide uniform charges and operating conditions for heavy vehicles engaged only in interstate work. Our former Treasurer, Peter Costello, asked the Productivity Commission to investigate the economic costs of freight infrastructure and efficient approaches to transport pricing. The Productivity Commission reported that pricing and regulatory arrangements were hampering the efficient provision and the productive use of road and rail infrastructure, identified a number of cost recovery issues and recommended a process of sequential reforms. This review was endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments in 2007. In February, Commonwealth, state and territory transport ministers agreed to update heavy vehicle registration charges at an Australian Transport Council meeting. The states and territories have already imposed these new charges on heavy vehicles under their registration system, and these amendments will permit the making of regulations to apply new registration charges to the five per cent of heavy vehicles registered under the Australian government’s Federal Interstate Registration Scheme, known as FIRS. This accounts for about 21,500 trucks. The Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008 also updates definitions in the Interstate Road Transport Charge Act 1985 and establishes a disallowable charge-setting mechanism based on regulation that will stipulate a table of changes or an annual adjustment process.

The Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill 2008 also amends the Fuel Tax Act 2006 to implement a road user charge rate of 21c per litre from January next year. This is an increase of 1.36c per litre from the current rate of 19.633c per litre. The government has proposed a four-year, $70 million heavy vehicle safety and productivity package for construction of roadside facilities and electronic monitoring technology trials, dependent on the successful passage of these bills.

Separately, the Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill 2008 repeals the road transport charges—that is, the Road Transport Charges (Australian Capital Territory) Act 1993, which currently prevents the ACT from setting its own heavy vehicle charges. While I endorse its intention, I am not interested in the ACT component at all but rather in the effects of the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008 nationally and in my own state of WA, and specifically in my electorate of Kalgoorlie.

As the House knows, my electorate covers more than two million square kilometres of Western Australia and heavy-vehicle road freight trucking is critical to the many widely dispersed communities and industries within that electorate, which, in recent years, have made a not insignificant contribution to the national economy. We rely on hardworking interstate truckies to go the distance across the Nullarbor and get all manner of products into and out of our state. We have such a reliance on them, as you can well imagine, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer. Without the trucking industry and those owner-operators and employed drivers in the trucking industry, the vast state of Western Australia, including my 2.3 million square kilometres of Western Australia, would grind to a halt. They are the absolute glue that allows us to maintain those communities. And, I might add, they earn a great deal of money for many, many businesses across the state of Western Australia.

We have, of course, a great desire to eventually create an intermodal hub in the goldfields, specifically in Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia, that will allow interstate rail freight coming from east to west to be offloaded in the goldfields and to then travel via road freight north, south and west. When that happens, hopefully quickly with the $3 million that I have obtained for the seed funding for that purpose, distribution of freight in Western Australia will be a little more efficient. You can understand how crucial interstate road transport is to us in WA and indeed all of Australia.

Also close to my heart is the issue of road safety, which goes hand in hand with any kind of road transport. Such is my concern for road transport that I have designed and released over a couple of years now a bumper sticker with a simple warning that says, ‘You don’t have to cause a crash to be killed in one’. The only other one I have designed most recently, by the way, says, ‘Rudd-a-dud-dud’. That is beside the point and another story.

In Western Australia there are more crashes in the metropolitan region than in rural parts of the state, like my electorate of Kalgoorlie. But the number of fatalities in rural WA is consistently higher than in the metropolitan region. The figures I am referring to are total figures, not percentages. More people die on country roads and highways than city ones, and this includes most of our main interstate highway links on the Great Eastern Highway, the Coolgardie to Esperance Highway, then the Eyre Highway and, going north, the North West Coastal Highway and the Great Northern Highway. Trucks mostly use these interstate links and, because they can be on the road at all hours of the day or night, they are right in the front line when it comes to safety.

We are talking about the safety of the truck drivers but this is also about the safety of other road users, and the list of examples is numerous. Holiday-makers are often unfamiliar with the experience of long drives on relatively high-speed roads, mixing it with interstate roadtrains. School buses routinely trundle along our highways and roads adjacent to our country towns. If they are suddenly confronted with wide loads, long loads and heavy loads, there can be a very dangerous interaction. When farmers are on roads moving plant and equipment from paddock to paddock and that is mixed with heavy haulage, it makes for a very dangerous situation.

Heaven forbid that I would impact on the financial viability of our tourism industry, especially self-drive tourists, but it is a very, very frightening experience for the overseas self-guided tourist on our country roads to be confronted with a roadtrain travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour. I have seen some of their reactions. A roadtrain occupies a lot of road width—believe me. The most at-risk species of all is the Japanese cyclist on long, straight roads. They are more and more plentiful in Western Australia. Their survival rate is quite high, but it is an ongoing miracle.

I will briefly raise some figures to illustrate how things are in WA. Anyone who has had the privilege of visiting our beautiful state will know that our roads are long and that sometimes towns and roadhouses are few and far between. In the 10 years to 2004, there were more than 720,000 vehicles recorded in all crashes. About 2.9 per cent of those vehicles were trucks. However, of those vehicles recorded in fatal crashes, 9.2 per cent were trucks. We all know how many things can contribute to vehicle crashes: speed, alcohol consumption, wildlife on the road, bad weather and the condition of the road. Some figures have indicated that fatigue is involved in about 15 per cent of fatal truck crashes and 11 per cent of those involving serious injury in WA. The number of these crashes is higher in rural areas of WA, where as many as 35 per cent of truck crashes are thought to be due to fatigue. Of course, tired drivers are less able to cope with the causes of road crashes: bad roads, weather conditions and traffic conditions.

Nationally, up to 42 per cent of all heavy vehicle crashes may be linked to driver fatigue and up to 30 per cent of fatal heavy vehicle crashes. What does driver fatigue have to do with the interstate road transport charges amendment? The answer is: quite a lot. This bill is all about cost recovery—in other words, the user-pays process. But exactly what are the trucking operators we depend on so much paying for? We know it is about recovering the cost imposed on the road system by the heavy vehicle industry, but if the truckies are paying to use the road then it should be as safe as possible. The Australian Trucking Association Chairman, Trevor Martyn, said this month, ‘Every truck driver and trucking operator knows we need more rest areas because fatigue is a major cause of truck accidents.’ This is why the Trucking Association has scrutinised this bill very carefully and believes the road user charge should be linked to the provision of rest areas. The Trucking Association has asked that any future increases in this charge be linked to construction of the new heavy vehicle rest areas on the AusLink national roads network—our fundamental freight and interstate transport routes. We think it is a great idea.

Australia’s states and territories have recently taken steps to introduce new fatigue management laws requiring truck drivers to take more rest stops. The problem is that there are not enough rest areas for them to stop in. We also have new national guidelines on how many rest areas our roads should have and what they should be like, but none of Australia’s major road freight routes comply with national guidelines on heavy vehicle rest areas and more than half of them have substantial deficiencies in meeting the guidelines. My own state of WA received a particularly bad report. Not only are our rest areas too far apart but less than half the rest stops we do have do not comply with recommended design and layout features.

The Trucking Association believes 900 rest areas are required to meet the national guidelines, but the coalition has been informed that 500 additional rest areas would bring the road network broadly into compliance. So we are shy 400 rest areas, and the government believes that this bill will solve the problem. These national guidelines are there to save lives. We estimate 500 new heavy vehicle rest areas would cost just $300 million over 10 years. That is a small amount compared to the revenue from the road user charge, which may run to more than $2 billion over the same period.

Let us compare these figures to the measly $70 million over four years that the government has offered for its heavy vehicle safety and productivity package—an offensive figure that is meanly dependent on the success of these bills I am now discussing. I dread to think how little each state and territory will benefit from this ungenerous offering. I will highlight a little why this figure is so offensive. We as a nation depend on road freight, as I have already said. In 2006-07, the road transport industry was worth $16.8 billion and employed 232,000 people. The amount of road freight is growing—historically, more than 30 per cent faster than the national economy. By 2020, road freight is expected to be 2.2 times as much as it was in the year 2000, which means at least 50,000 more trucks on the roads. How far do you think Labor’s vague $70 million package over four years will go to support a growing industry already worth $16.8 billion? It is so meagre that it is insulting. The coalition’s $300 million plan for another 500 heavy vehicle rest areas will give Australia’s truckies the rest they need and ensure the roads are safer for all Australians, both now and in the future. Money needs to be spent on making our roads safer, and we want to make darn sure it does get spent.

Let me now briefly address the topic of indexation. We know that in this second attempt the government has removed a link to indexation from the Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill, but we are concerned that they have left it to separate regulation to amend the Fuel Tax Act. Fuel indexation is nothing more than a tax by stealth. The coalition know it, and so does the Australian Trucking Association—and neither of us likes it. This is why the coalition have suggested that we completely remove the possibility of indexing from the Fuel Tax Act. The government wants the legislation to allow that the regulations ‘may prescribe a method for indexing the road user charge’. We do not want to prescribe it; we want to proscribe it so that the legislation should actually state that the minister must not apply a method of indexing the road user charge. The government would then need parliament to approve any increases in the road user charge. We think that is a fair and democratic process—and certainly the trucking industry does.

While I am talking about fairness let me bring up the issue of the fair setting of charges. As I mentioned earlier, the road user charge is a form of cost recovery from the trucking industry. Even though this amendment increases the road user charge the truck operators have to pay, the Australian Trucking Association does not oppose the increase. But it would like to know how the new charge was worked out. The National Transport Commission did not provide adequate information or consultation to the trucking industry about the model behind the road user charge.

My fellow members know that we would hate to accuse the government of a lack of transparency, but that is exactly what we are doing. We would like the government to explain itself and provide all the data, methodologies and formulae that were used to determine the road user charge. We also think any proposed rate increases should be subject to public consultation. This will make the road user charge setting process more open, honest, and transparent—and that is fair.

I now come to the last point I would like to talk about today, and that is the absurd state of affairs our interstate truckies have to deal with in regard to differing transport regulations between states and territories. The differences are not just ridiculous; they are contradictory and distracting. I have made the point more than once that safety is a critical issue on our roads, both generally and in particular for the trucking industry we rely on so much. Our truckies need to be thinking about their job when they are behind the wheel, and not worrying about bizarre and frustrating red tape and the different regulations that they have to conform to when they cross borders. There is so much differentiation that it spins the head. If you were travelling, for example from Sydney to Perth, you would cross through four state jurisdictions and you would be subject to four separate regulations such as the frequency of rest stops—with regulations surrounding fatigue and the duration of stops; regulations about how often you have to stop to rest and water stock, if you were carrying stock; and regulations about whether you have to carry a log book. It is an absolute nonsense.

We have all heard the Rudd government talking up its ability to work constructively with state and territory governments, but, nearly a year since this government was elected, we are still waiting for consistent and harmonious national transport regulations. This is why the coalition has flagged an amendment that would require the road user charge to be increased only if substantial harmonisation has been achieved in state and territory transport regulations, including heavy vehicle reform measures. The government has missed a significant opportunity for regulation reform, and our truckies are paying the price.

In conclusion, I reiterate the coalition’s very reasonable concerns about these bills which I have expressed today regarding heavy vehicle rest areas, indexation, fair setting of charges, and the need for regulatory harmonisation between states and territories. I emphasise that the amendments we have flagged are an opportunity for the government to finally share our serious commitment to the heavy vehicle road transport industry and to making that industry safer and more efficient now and into the future.

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