Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I note that during the second reading debate there was a series of questions I specifically asked for the minister, in summation, to provide the House with answers to so that we could actually consider this bill properly. I note this is ostensibly a bill about road safety and the government's decision to delay for two years the implementation of regulations that will improve vehicle—including trucks, cars and caravans—safety on our roads across the country. In particular I asked the Minister representing the Deputy Prime Minister to provide some answers to the following things. The first is that one of the reasons for the government's decision to delay is that the department is not ready to implement its IT structure. What I would like to know is: what resources will government provide to the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development to implement the IT system needed to put in place these new regulations? So, a simple question: how much money is the government providing to the department to actually implement these new regulations?

Second, what are the outstanding issues that the government thinks it's going to be able to resolve in the next two years prior to the implementation in 2021? What are those outstanding issues, and what is the consultation process that the government intends to undertake to resolve these issues? The government has said there is a need for a delay to this legislation. It's said it needs two years for this legislation to be implemented. What's it going to do in that two-year period? What consultation is it going to undertake, and what money is going to be provided to the department to actually advise industry of these changes? What is it actually going to do? They are pretty simple questions. We've said we think this is a failure of both implementation and leadership on behalf of the government, particularly when it comes to the very important issue of road safety and improving the safety of our vehicles on Australian roads. It's a really simple series of questions: What is it that you're going to do in the next two years to actually be ready by July 2021 to implement this legislation? How much money are you going to be giving to the department to implement the IT system? What's the process for that? What are the outstanding issues you think you need to resolve over the course of the next 18 months, and how are you going to resolve those? What are you going to do for those industries which have already spent substantial resources to actually implement this? What are you going to do?

All of those questions are things that I asked the minister so he would be able to come back into this place and actually tell this parliament. You've asked for the delay; this is delay on your own legislation. This is not legislation that we introduced when we were back in government. This is your own legislation, and you've asked for a delay. The very least you can do is to provide this parliament with some simple answers—some simple answers as to what assurances you are going to be able to give this place so that we're not, in two years time or even a year from now, going to have the government say: 'We haven't done anything. The IT system's still not in place. We haven't actually managed to sort out some of the industry issues, which have been pretty hard to sort out anyway. We haven't really put any resources into the IT system. We haven't undertaken a mass education campaign to educate industry of the changes that are needed. We haven't done any of that.' What assurances have we got that you're not going to come back into this place in 12 or 18 months time or in two years time and say, 'We're still not ready'? Until you can give us answers to those, it remains a serious question as to what assurances we've got that in fact the government—which has asked for a further two-year delay because of its failure to implement its own legislation—is going to actually do anything. At the moment we've got absolutely none. Again, I remind the House that this is a question of road safety. A piece of legislation that the government's own second reading amendments on the original legislation say will improve vehicle safety in this country—therefore, you would imagine it would save lives in this country if we had better, safer vehicles on our roads—and in fact say will save industry millions of dollars is being delayed for two years. That is what we've been debating here, and I think that it is incumbent on the government to— (Time expired)

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