Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Road Safety Remuneration Repeal Bill 2016 and the associated bill, the Road Safety Remuneration Amendment (Protecting Owner Drivers) Bill 2016, which, as a fallback position, would defer the implementation of rulings of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. I was listening to the remarks from the member for Kingsford Smith and am given to reflect that most of his speech was actually spent talking about things which have very little to do with the current ruling from the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal which affects owner-drivers. But you have got to hand it to the unions and the ALP—they have this uncanny ability to make a cup of poison sound like it is really good for you, that it is as good as a serve of roast duck, for instance. They can dress up almost anything to make it sound as if it is a good outcome. The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is certainly an instance of that. It is a Labor-union fit-up that is totally committed to unionising the full industry so they can control it from top to bottom.

I must turn to the remarks by the shadow minister for employment and workplace relations at the opening of this debate. He made an absolutely disgraceful linkage with a tragic accident that happened in my electorate yesterday, near Crystal Brook on Highway 1. He went through the details of those fatalities, the age of the driver and the kinds of things you find in the newspaper, with absolutely no background understanding of the accident at all. Then, after making that very strong link between the RSRT's current rulings and the accident, he said, 'Of course, you should not jump to any conclusions that it was the truck driver's fault.' That is a disgraceful linkage, something that a member of parliament should not be drawn into. If they do not know anything about a particular incident, they had best keep their head down. My informers tell me that it is highly unlikely that the truck driver was at fault in this case, but it does not make it any less a great tragedy. I think it would have been better if we had left that debate alone.

The heart of this ruling is that the RSRT singles out owner-operator truckies as being more dangerous than those they may employ to put in their truck cabs. The premise is that they must charge more if they or their family are sitting on the operator's seat. If the owner-operator is sitting on top of his $450,000 investment, the very suggestion that he or she would be less careful with that investment than an employee would just beggars belief.

I have been speaking to numerous truck families since this ruling came to bear down on us in the last few weeks. I have a bit of a list here. I spoke to Joy and Colin Plane, from Price on Yorke Peninsula. Joy has been a fearless campaigner. She has been tracking all over Adelaide, she has contacted all the crossbenchers and she was here yesterday for the rally in Canberra. They have spent 33 years in transport, with one truck. Their son is now operating as an owner-driver. This ruling by the RSRT is destined to drive them out of business.

I also spoke to Don Davey, another truck operator, in the Ardrossan area on Yorke Peninsula. Scott and Rodney Quinn, from Cleve, operate a pretty big business. I think they run about 30 trucks, but they employ 30 subbies as well, and those subbies are mainly owner-operators. Rodney rang me up when the deferment came through a week ago and he said, 'The court has just saved me the job of picking up the phone on Monday and telling seven owner-operators their services are no longer required.' This is serious stuff.

I also spoke to David Smith, from Smith Haulage in Tumby Bay; Leteesha and Michael Burke, from Port Pirie; Belinda Wheare, from DJ and JM Wheare on Yorke Peninsula; Rod Moore Transport, from Peterborough; and Natasha and Craig Landorf, from Booborowie. I also sat down with some local truckies from my home town: David and Barb Phillips and Don and Annie Beinke. They are all just bewildered that the government or any body of the government could do this to them. They cannot understand why someone would do it. Why would they make the supposition that (a) they are more dangerous drivers and (b) they will have to charge more for their services than if they put an employee in the seat? The why is pretty simple. I explained it to them. It is because the owner-operators are a disparate lot, an independent lot, and they are virtually impossible to unionise. The unions are very comfortable with the big companies. The big companies allow them access to their workforce so they can sign them up to the union. I do not know, but I would be surprised if the big companies did not supply some funding to the unions to help them in this task, but I do not know that for sure. The trucking companies, of course, are willing to deduct membership fees for the unions—more members, more money to pour back into the ALP campaigns, more numbers on the conference floors and more ability to influence selections of people who may be elected to parliaments around Australia. No wonder the TWU hate owner-operators.

Australia is a free country. Surely a legislated minimum price on product and service is a restraint of trade. Certainly it is anticompetitive. Imagine if we put a minimum price on shampoo—not something I use all that much of, I must admit!—or pies or plumbing services or anything else you care to turn your mind to. Firstly, this puts a great restraint on the economy. It is almost guaranteed to take away a competitive edge and that spirit of entrepreneurialism that we should foster in Australia, where people stick their neck out and have a go. If you legislate this flat line across the economy, it does not matter what you do it with, you upset that balance. So we absolutely should allow people who run their own businesses to set the fees for their own services. It is the way our economy should operate.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has reported that this ruling by the RSRT is likely to cost $2.3 billion—$2,300 million—to the economy over the next 15 years and threatens the jobs of 3½ thousand workers. That should be enough to make anyone draw breath. In the part of the world that I come from, the regions of South Australia, the bulk of the trucking task, apart from the interstate movements which run right through the electorate, is carried by owner-operators. There are links that go back into the grain industry. Some might argue that the grain industry is short-haul; it is not necessarily. In fact, my farm is situated 240 kilometres from the port. Is a round trip a long haul? Is a second trip during the day a long haul? Is a primary product like wheat or milk that is en route to the supermarket because it is en route to the manufacturer along the way? There are so many unanswered questions for those people trying to run trucking businesses at the moment.

One of the truckies I was talking to thought he was doing the right thing, but when he ran some sums on his business he concluded that his freight rate for trucking grain was going to have to increase by 25 per cent, which would immediately put him out of business. An extra few dollars to the grower means: 'We don't utilise that truckie. He's finished.' I have received reports from the trucking retail industry that their order books have just dried up and that some operators have cancelled orders for the delivery of new trucks. The uncertainty has meant that they have put them on hold until this is cleared up and they know they have a business into the future. They are the kinds of signals that tell us there is something terribly wrong with this ruling by the RSRT and, by extension, probably with the RSRT itself.

It is dominated by people who have past union links. In fact, the head of it comes out of the ACTU. It is also an interesting read to look at their salary packages. There is somebody in the transport industry that is doing all right and certainly those Fair Work commissioners are among those, with salaries in excess of $400,000 a year. I lot of my truckies would dearly love to get their hands on that kind of money.

They have used an ingenious method to pass the penalty on to the truckies. The fines are not actually aimed at the truckies; they are aimed at the people who utilise the truckies. While the truckie might think, 'I might take a risk' or 'I might do this or I might that;' in fact there is a very little they can do because their customer says to them, 'I can't afford to take a risk with you, so consider your services terminated.' That is exactly what has been happening.

I have seen some truckies upset over the time. I talk to them regularly; a number of operators whom I go to for sage advice on the transport industry, particularly in South Australia. I have never seen them so crook on anything. They are beside themselves. I think back over a number of other issues they have come to me with and they have been grumpy, but I have never seen them like this. They have just said, 'This will destroy the industry.'

We saw some of that passion out on the lawns in front of Parliament House this morning, with the truckies making the effort to come to Canberra. As I pointed out, one woman who came to the rally yesterday had made the very long trip from York Peninsula to Canberra. They know this is so important to the industry, and it is so important to my constituents. Anything that significantly drives up the freight rates in regional South Australia, significantly drives up the cost of living in South Australia. We are absolutely freight dependent. We pay freight on objects. We pay freight on the things we produce and sell. We pay freight on all of our inputs. We are absolutely dependent.

As a past grain grower, I can tell you about the ever growing cost of freight into that final wheat cheque. It is hard to contemplate that it costs more to get my wheat down the road 200 kilometres than it costs to take it to the other side of the world once you have it on a boat. I am not saying in any way that we are being ripped off in the system; I do not think we are, as they all have expenses to meet. But the very idea that we would put a minimum price into the system that would raise that cost for everybody is an absolute threat to all of our businesses.

With those remarks, I will round up. I am very pleased to hear that it sounds like we have the support to get this through the Senate. It might be worthwhile for those who supported it in the first place who have now changed their mind to contemplate how that came about, and maybe they might take more care over legislation that comes before them in the future.

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