Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The Road Safety Remuneration Repeal Bill 2016 is a Liberal government bill to effectively abolish Australia's Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, and I think that really says it all. We are abolishing the body specifically established by this parliament some years ago to improve safety on our roads by improving the safety and conditions of owner truck drivers in the industry that is the most dangerous industry in our nation. What is occurring here is quite troubling, and many people have asked me over recent weeks why the government is actually doing this—why the government is seeking to abolish the body that was specifically established to improve safety on our roads by targeting the area that causes the most accidents.

The question that we need to ask ourselves is: why do we need a Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal? It is because of these quite shocking facts: firstly, that the fatality rates for the trucking industry are 12 times the national average. Those driving trucks on our roads are 12 times more likely to have an accident than the national average. Last month alone, 25 people died on our roads as a result of heavy vehicle accidents. It is not just those owner-drivers that are at risk, because, as we know, many people share our roads, and often it is innocent victims that are killed by truck drivers who are driving in unsafe conditions. It is the families—the men, women and children—who may be killed by an unsafe truck driver. It is the cyclists. It is the pedestrians. It is others who are innocent victims of the shocking rates of safety in this industry. This is quite simply the unsafest, most dangerous industry in the nation, and the facts establish this. The facts establish that there is a serious problem with road safety when it comes to the trucking industry.

Any government worth its salt—any government that looks at problems in our nation and how you fix them—would be derelict in not looking at the issues associated with this industry and doing something about it, and that is what Labor did when we were in government. We accepted the advice of experts. It was independent advice from organisations like the Productivity Commission, from academics and from international studies in other nations like the United States that pointed to the fact that there is a direct link between the rates of pay of truck drivers and the safety outcomes on our roads. This government wants to trash the tribunal specifically established by the previous government to stop accidents which cause serious death and injury on our roads. It is illogical and it is downright dangerous—dangerous for every Australian that uses our roads.

Why is the trucking industry so dangerous? Again, we know the answer to this. We know what the facts tell us, because there have been numerous studies and investigations into this industry. We know that truck drivers are forced to drive for long, unsafe hours by big multinational companies that they work for just to make a living. I know we have some owner-drivers in the audience here today, and I know many truck drivers, including many owner-drivers, and I have to say I feel for them, because they are forced to sweat the assets which they own, to skimp on maintenance, to drive overnight for long periods, to avoid taking breaks and to drive fatigued just to earn a quid. But it should not be like that, and we should not abolish a body specifically set up to ensure that we lift the rates of everyone that works in the industry and that no-one is disadvantaged by lifting the minimum bar to improve safety conditions in this country and stop the situation where owner-drivers literally have to undercut each other in a dog-eat-dog world to make a living.

It is a fact that there have been literally hundreds of investigations, coronial inquests and reports from police which have stated that a free market rate for truck drivers compromised safety. Quite simply, there is a direct link between the minimum rates of pay for truck drivers and safety, fatality and accident figures in this country and indeed throughout the world. There are literally hundreds of studies and inquiries that have been conducted into this issue, particularly over the last decade, and almost all have concluded that there is a significant link between scheduling pressures, unpaid waiting times, insecure rewards and access to work and hazardous practices such as speeding, excessive hours and drug use by drivers just to make ends meet.

A 2001 Australian study found that drivers who were paid in terms of the amount of work they did reportedly worked more fatigued, and worked fatigued more often, than those who were paid in terms of the hours that they actually work—an hourly rate, like most workers throughout the country. The United States National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, in a 2002 report, demonstrated that in the USA there were widespread unsafe driving practices and regulatory noncompliance, and there was a direct link between a free market for owner-drivers in terms of what they were paid—undercutting and a dog-eat-dog world—and these safety results. The US Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which also reported in 2002, demonstrated that higher compensation led to significantly safer truck driver performance. For every 10 per cent more in truck driver mileage pay rates, the    very large American truck load carrier found that the probability that a driver would have an accident, or a crash, declined by 40 per cent.

I am not an expert in this field, but I have done a bit of research over the course of the last week in preparing this speech and there is also my work as a lawyer in this area of occupational health and safety over the last decade. All of the studies that I have read and all of the cases which I have been involved in—unfortunately, some of those were serious workers compensation claims for death and serious and permanent impairment—have demonstrated that there is a direct link between the rate of pay that people get and the safety outcomes in a particular industry. It is a simple fact, it is simple common sense, that if you pay someone a fair and decent wage to ensure that they can get by, work a reasonable amount of hours, live, feed a family, send their kids to school and are able to buy the necessities of life off that wage then they are not going to work ridiculous hours where they become fatigued and engage in unsafe work practices just to make ends meet. So there is a direct correlation between rates of remuneration for drivers and safety accident rates.

The commentary over the last couple of weeks has been that some owner-drivers say they will be put out of business. I want to make it clear: I do not want to put any owner-driver out of business. We do not want a situation where owner-drivers are forced to undercut each other on the rates that they offer to businesses just to make ends meet—but the solution is not having any minimum rates. The solution is not abolishing this body and ensuring that there is no minimum standard to which people are paid and which they work by. It has been shown in industries throughout the world that that develops into a dog-eat-dog system, where it is a race to the bottom. When you are talking about the most dangerous industry in the country, you simply cannot allow that to occur. It has been shown that there is direct link between the rates of pay that someone is paid and safety on our roads.

This exact system is the reason why the trucking industry is the most dangerous in Australia, and it is precisely because of this dog-eat-dog system that has existed in the past that people have been dying on our roads. It is precisely why studies recommend a minimum rate of pay for truck drivers as the best way to improve safety. A pure market without minimum conditions will result in more accidents and more deaths, and that is exactly why Labor is opposing this legislation which effectively abolishes the body that has been put in place to ensure a minimum standard into the future. Removing minimum standards, removing minimum rates of pay for owner-drivers, will, in my view, result in more unsafe practices in the trucking industry and ultimately more deaths on our roads—and that is not something that we want to be encouraging here in this parliament.

The minimum conditions that are established by the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal are undertaken and reported in determinations after that body conducts an inquiry. It just does not come up with a figure and hand down that figure overnight. It conducts inquiries, takes evidence, looks at the studies that are being quoted by me and many other speakers and makes determinations. Importantly, it provides a lead-in-time to these determinations so that things are not occurring overnight. The current determination, which has been the subject of some controversy, has been out there for a while and this has given the operators an opportunity to adjust to it.

Instead of a knee-jerk reaction from the government, instead of seeking to merely abolish this body, if there are issues with this determination and how it will operate for owner-drivers then why doesn't the government sit down with the tribunal, with the owner drivers, with the Transport Workers Union, with the opposition and with the crossbenchers to try and work on modifying the system? Labor have certainly said that we will sit down and negotiate to modify this system. We would be happy to compromise to ensure that we get an effective determination so that owner-drivers do not feel that they will be forced into unfinancial situations by it and, importantly, that we are not undercutting a minimum set of safety conditions existing in this industry. But, instead, the government has refused to negotiate.

The government have refused to even countenance sensible negotiation, a sensible compromise, to ensure that we can continue to set minimum standards of safety on our roads. Nope, they have just moved to abolish this body. That, I think, is unreasonable, it is unfair and it flies in the face of all the evidence that has been presented over the course of the last decade, through independent inquiry after independent inquiry, to governments of all persuasions here in Australia and indeed throughout the world about the need to do something about safety in the trucking industry. The statistic I quoted earlier that the trucking industry is 12 times more dangerous than other industries throughout the country is something that we simply cannot ignore. As legislators with an obligation to look at this and improve road safety, we must do all we can to ensure that we keep a body that has effectively been established to ensure that minimum conditions do prevail and that we do not implement a system where drivers are undercutting each other and forcing each other to work in unsafe conditions. So it is on that basis that I and my Labor colleagues will be opposing the repeal of this important body, because it does set minimum conditions and those minimum conditions ensure that our roads are safer.

See this speech in context