Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

I take the opportunity in this brief amount of time available to me to talk to the chamber of about an issue that I know many of us in regional and rural areas grapple with, and that is road safety. In particular, members may notice I am wearing the 'Save the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal' badge. This is an organisation specifically targeted at the task of road safety and is under threat from the government.

It was the result of a campaign for over 20 years that the Transport Workers Union have been running to create not only a safe workplace for the drivers who manage these big rigs on our roads to move the goods around the country that we need but also on behalf of the communities that they travel through—those that are using our roads as drivers and pedestrians who rely on our professional truck drivers to be able to do their job in a safe way.

The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal was established to ensure that it could make orders about the minimum remuneration and entitlements for drivers; the conditions about minimum rates of remuneration and conditions of engagement for owner drivers; about industry practices for loading and unloading vehicles, waiting times, working hours, load limits, payment methods and payment periods; and, in particular, removing incentives pressures and practices that not created unsafe work practices for our truck drivers but just as importantly endangered all users of our roads. I commend them on the campaign. It was a good Labor outcome to establish a tribunal and I urge the government not to dismantle it.

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