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

One in 30. And of course at the time people would have put arguments about how that cost impacted—that is, how higher safety levels might impact on the business arrangements at the time. They are never easy decisions. They are never easy processes. But no-one in our community would argue that loosening up the safety requirements we put in place in that industry because of its horrific death rates is the right thing to do.

The time has come for the trucking industry. The workers in that industry deserve the same systemic approach to their industry to make it safe, not only for them but, uniquely, because they share their workplace, for the rest of us on the roads. I have been to many, many briefings on this particular issue since the change of government. I have met with the widows who come here to talk to these parliamentarians. In one case, it was about the lady's husband. In another case, the lady's husband was killed on the side of the road; he was not the truck driver. I have talked to truck drivers. There is the gentleman who has gone public saying he has attended 52 funerals in his working life. It is incomprehensible. If there were 52 people killed in any other industry, we would not be tolerating continued structural arrangements that allow for that level of death rate. That is how serious this is. I do not bring anything to this dispatch box other than a really genuine and serious concern that we have an industry that is crying out for us to do something about it, and we have communities who share their roads with that industry saying to us, 'There is a bigger problem here, and it needs to be addressed.'

We did. As a result of the evidence that came forward—and I refer honourable members to the advisory report on the bill, which the committee did, and there is a dissenting report in there—we came to the view that the most effective way to do that would be to establish the tribunal and task it with the job of looking at the industry and at particular sectors of the industry to see whether there was a chain-of-command problem that was putting pressure unreasonably on all levels of that chain so that the cascade effect was that you ended up with unsafe practices.

Decisions are made by tribunals. Sometimes they are difficult for one part of the community, and we work as parliaments and governments to find transition methods and how you would manage that and do it effectively. It looked initially like that was what the government were going to do, but then they decided to just jump and abolish the tribunal. I think that is a really short-sighted decision to have made. I think that, if they had wanted to discuss—as indeed our shadow minister said—how these things could be implemented and managed in ways that took people's concerns into consideration, we could have at least continued to progress the issue of the structural problems around safety in the trucking industry. But they have not; they have decided to abolish the tribunal—and they have done it with a whole lot of rhetoric. I hope not all speakers on the other side fall into the trap of simply union bashing. They believe that we, because of generations of understanding the role of unions in protecting people's wellbeing and safety at work, somehow bring dirty hands to this debate. I will not tolerate that. It is an unacceptable assessment of what the debate is about, and I am not going to allow that sort of comment to stand unchallenged. It is beneath people in this place. We can have differences of opinion about how to improve road safety, but I think it is pretty cheap to question people's motivations when it comes to safety.

I say to the government: talk to the opposition; talk to the key players in the sector, certainly. Let's see if we can find ways to make this a manageable issue for those who are having problems. But we need this tribunal. We need it because over decades it has been proved that the other measures—infrastructure improvements, rules and regulations, laws and enforcement—while important, are not enough. There is a structural problem. It is impacting the safety of everyone on our roads. This tribunal needs to be allowed to do its job, and this bill should be removed from this House.

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