Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that the maintenance of safe, sustainable rates in the trucking industry is essential for ensuring community safety on our roads; and

(2) calls on the Government to retain the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal intact, and not to allow profit-taking to take precedence over the reasonable safety of motorists and truck drivers.

Like many Australians who understand the trucking industry, I am astounded that the government is considering abandoning the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. The link between trucking accidents and the contract conditions of owner-drivers has been established beyond reasonable doubt in report after report. We expect heavy haulage drivers to operate in a safe manner with proper fatigue management practices in place, but we know that unless owner-drivers are paid reasonable rates and are given reasonable delivery schedules the pressure will be on to cut corners to meet the high cost environments in which they operate. For many owner-drivers, many of whom I know, the stakes are very high. They mortgage their houses to buy their rigs. They cannot afford to turn down unsafe jobs. I have watched the pressure under which these truckies have operated over the last three decades. Indeed, I was in my twenties when I first learnt of the alternative meaning of the mixed grill, the cocktail of pills that is used to keep going on those punishing schedules like the Perth-Darwin run.

When I became the transport minister in WA I was appalled to see that same pressure to drive too long and overload was still being applied to drivers. It was appalling to see the resistance to the chain of responsibility legislation that would have made those cost-cutting principles take some responsibility. It is all very well for Coles and Woolworths and the like to engage in cost-cutting wars, but in the end someone pays. Here it is the truck drivers and their families and, tragically, very often other road users, people like Suzanne De Beer, a very wonderful, very compassionate WA woman whose husband was killed by a fatigued truck driver. She attended the trial of that truck driver, and she had this to say:

That day in court, hearing all the detail of the case and how long the guy had been on the road; my thought was he should not have been the only one on trial. You know there's the whole industry should've been on trial … that day.

And indeed they should.

We have made some progress. I was very pleased that in WA we were able to put in place the very first protective legislation in Australia in the Owner-Drivers (Contracts and Disputes) Act 2007. And, federally, the Labor government took this up with the establishment of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal in 2012, establishing a mandatory minimum rate of pay and related conditions for employed and self-employed truck drivers, removing that pressure to contribute to unsafe work practices—and it has worked. It has worked. The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics has shown a 30 per cent fall in the number of fatal truck crashes involving articulated trucks over the last year.

We demand that the irresponsible history of denial by the minister for transport that there is a compelling link between the terms of contracts of truck drivers and the time and cost schedules under which they are put and the safety of truck drivers be addressed. We can no longer deny this link. We need to act now. We need to ensure that that legislation which has so comprehensively been demonstrated to produce sound results is supported and not repealed. On this matter, we must take a practical, pragmatic approach, put ideology on hold and make sure that we give our truck drivers a safe working environment and that we ensure that all of our road users are not being undermined by cost-cutting, reprehensible behaviour on the part of the trucking industry.

See this speech in context