Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Road safety is a major issue in our country. Australians were outraged when 521 of our servicemen were killed in the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1975. Yet in less than twelve months on Australian roads last year more than 1,290 lives were lost, more than double the deaths in one year on Australian roads than in more than 12 years of war.

Today I rise to speak on the Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011 and the Road Safety Remuneration (Consequential Amendments and Related Provisions) Bill 2011. The coalition is committed to improving road safety in the heavy vehicle industry and making roads safer for all road users. Indeed, the coalition has a record of supporting measures which improve conditions for drivers. It was a coalition government which created, implemented and delivered record funding levels through the AusLink program. It was the coalition which developed and promoted the crucial Roads to Recovery program and the Black Spot Program after the Keating government had cancelled it. And it was the coalition which committed to spending $100 million over five years on 100 rest areas on the AusLink network. The latter was as a result of a recommendation calling for higher quality rest stops for heavy vehicles, which came from an inquiry chaired by my colleague the member for Hinkler which delivered the report Beyond the midnight oil. It was an inquiry into managing fatigue in the transport industry. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to my colleague the member for Hinkler for the dedicated and relentless work he has put in for more than a decade to improve safety for all Australians on the road.

Despite the increased number of trucks on the road and the increased distance they travel, numbers of deaths from crashes involving articulated and heavy rigid trucks have decreased. In fact, the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority has concluded that heavy vehicle drivers are at fault in only 31 per cent of heavy vehicle crashes, with the remaining 69 per cent a result of other road users. Of course, even one death is one death too many.

The Road Safety Remuneration Bill was appropriately referred to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications, because most people agree that there is a direct correlation between road safety and the standard and condition of our roads and highways. Sadly, however, this bill is not about road infrastructure, badly neglected by successive Labor governments in Queensland for more than 20 years. No, this legislation is about establishing a new Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which is to be given broad powers to investigate and set pay rates and conditions for any segment of the heavy vehicle industry.

No-one doubts the difficulties involved in driving and managing heavy vehicles. During the hearing held by the committee, the Transport Workers Union of Australia raised many varied examples of their members' needs and experiences. One example given was about the Brisbane City Council, which they praised for entrenching driver conditions as part of its garbage contract. In the lead-up to that contract being finalised, I spent five hours in a garbage truck observing firsthand the difficulties experienced by drivers, not the least of which was as a result of the previous Labor Lord Mayor's insistence on an unworkable dual bin truck system.

That firsthand experience is one of the reasons the coalition members tabled a dissenting report—because we know that a one-size bill does not suit all cases. It is very difficult to legislate for conditions which vary so much depending on different driver situations. We are concerned about so-called 'jurisdictional creep', which has seen the proposed bill extended to include intrastate courier operators, which is not supported by the evidence. We also do not believe that adding another layer of bureaucracy will improve safety outcomes but believe rather that it will lead to increased costs for industry and consumers.

This bill proposes to set up a new body and to implement new regulations and new restrictions. This bill and the associated amendments will simply cost taxpayers millions of dollars without any appreciable benefit for the road transport industry. There are already existing laws in each state, and even the Queensland Labor government opposes this bill. Members on the opposite side of the House regularly come into this chamber and say that they are 'listening' to the needs of both business and workers. This bill is further evidence that they are really not listening at all.

As a member of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications, I would like to express my appreciation to the hardworking secretariat. To Julia Morris, Kilian Perrem, Susan Dinon and Peter Pullen: thank you for your support and assistance. To everyone who made submissions, and especially those who attended the public hearing on 15 February, I thank you for your contribution. Through this process, many concerns were raised about what this bill will achieve—and we were listening.

I would therefore like to reiterate to the House the comments I made in conjunction with my coalition colleagues in the dissenting report. We understand and appreciate the original intention of these bills. We acknowledge the important work that is required to ensure that the safety and welfare of drivers is seriously considered by this parliament. We do not, however, believe that these bills appropriately address these considerations.

The government have indicated that they intend to move some amendments to this bill. It is a shame they could not manage to table them before we started to debate the bill. Indeed, I trust they now take on board the points raised in our dissenting report so we can support them. Wherever there is a move to improve safety that will truly be beneficial to drivers and to the community at large, the coalition will support such a move.

At its core, this bill will establish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which will be handed very broad powers to investigate the heavy vehicle industry and dictate the pay rates and conditions for its workers. The heavy vehicle industry itself constitutes long-distance operations, the road transport and distribution industry, the cash-in-transit industry, the waste management industry and all other road transport drivers. In doing so, it would also add to the purview of the tribunal all road transport drivers, including independent contractors. The government would then appoint to the tribunal members from Fair Work Australia. It would also comprise industry members. The tribunal could then issue orders, stipulating minimum remuneration and employment conditions, and control other industry practices such as waiting times, working hours and load limits.

There are two main reasons I oppose the main bill. Firstly, it will not perform as it was intended to perform, and it will not make the roads safer in this nation. Secondly, it creates a new layer of bureaucracy and adds to jurisdictional creep between state and federal legislation, decreasing flexibility in the industry and increasing red tape. When will this government learn that you cannot fix problems by more bureaucracy!

In the dissenting report, the coalition noted the lack of evidence that increases in remuneration will lead to an improvement in road safety outcomes. It is a merely an assertion by the government. It is also an assertion that is not even backed up by the government's own regulatory impact statement, which says 'data at this point in time is limited and being definitive around the causal link between rates and safety is difficult'. We need to be very specific here before we go about restructuring an industry. It is easy to say that remuneration rates and safety are linked, but that is not an argument per se to suggest that current remuneration rates or conditions are inadequate. Indeed, during the inquiry I noted that, even if all workers were paid at what they might consider a reasonable rate, there would still exist the competition between workers to succumb to the pressure of delivery time limits. At the margin—at the level of the individual worker—it would be difficult to determine at what level a worker suddenly decides that they are being paid enough. Every worker would like to be paid more, but it would be difficult to determine at what level a worker suddenly decides that they are not going to push through their fatigue and keep driving or when completing the job in less time no longer seems an attractive proposition. We cannot aggregate the risk attitudes of every driver in this industry and come up with a one-size-fits-all policy and regulation that will ensure safety.

The member for Bradfield also questioned during the public hearing whether a worker has time and income preferences such that they may actually decide to work the same number of hours at a higher pay rate, thereby continuing the effects of speeding and fatigue on road safety. This should also be considered in the context of the regulatory scheme under which the transport industry currently operates, and that leads me to my second issue, which is the jurisdictional creep these bills create. Currently, we have rafts of legislation at both the Commonwealth and the state levels that either directly or indirectly cover the road transport industry. Not only are these workers and their conditions subject to the Fair Work Act and its related Modern Award principles; they are also subject to workplace health and safety legislation and independent contractor legislation. There are already existing laws that apply to things like wages, conditions, vehicle standards, fatigue, speed, substance abuse, record keeping and other driver obligations.

Some, including the TWU, have argued that the current regulations are not working. But, if we take a step back and look at the entirety of what is happening in this industry, we see there have been huge reforms passed and many are in the early stages of implementation. We must consider the steps that have been taken more recently to address the specific concerns in the industry. There is the new national initiative, the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator and the national heavy vehicle law, the national fatigue management rules and the upcoming national chain of responsibility measures. These initiatives are designed to specifically address many of the safety issues. For example, the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator will commence its operations from 1 January 2013. It has been developed through many years of consultation through the Coalition of Australian Governments process, to harmonise confusing and conflicting regulations. The regulation includes a national chain of responsibility measure that will make companies directly responsible for unsafe driver behaviour. This regulator also has provisions that relate to, for example, fatigue management. The New South Wales submission to the inquiry commented that a new tribunal could, in fact, make orders that are inconsistent with the national heavy vehicle law.

For the last decade Australian governments have been trying to untangle the very confusing situation in this industry. These bills will be the fourth layer of regulation covering driver fatigue in New South Wales. Today's bills will completely undo the good work that has already been done in this area. It is also important to consider that the main bill will make the industry far less flexible and reduce its ability to adapt and respond to changing circumstances. In this industry flexibility is paramount given the huge dependence on fuel prices and the inherent volatility of global oil prices. In the previous five years to June 2011, productivity gains slumped to only 0.6 per cent per annum. A new tribunal and its road safety remuneration orders will stifle efficiency gains and innovation, reflecting the top-down wishes of the tribunal instead of current conditions which allow the industry to respond to changing conditions.

The dissenting report notes that evidence was submitted to the committee regarding a particular focus on improving road infrastructure, an increased focus with which I agree. Road transport workers have had to drive on insufferable roads for too long. I note that in Queensland the Bruce Highway has been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair by successive state Labor governments. Constantly besieged by natural disasters such as what we saw during the big wet season last year, it can be cut off for inordinate amounts of time. Fortunately, the LNP in Queensland under Campbell Newman have compiled a crisis action plan as a fundamental priority for the main highway of the state, should they win government. It is this kind of constructive action that will make an appreciable difference for road transportation industry workers and all Queenslanders.

At a federal level, the coalition recognises the importance of maintaining our national road network to ensure that our roads are accessible and safe. Since we proudly initiated the Roads to Recovery program in 2001, local councils have been able to maintain and upgrade local roads. At the last election we proposed the restoration of the strategic regional roads program which supports regional connections and creates jobs. It would mean a further $351 million for the health of the regional economy and the safety of those servicing these regional areas. These are real, important measures that the government can implement to ensure that we diminish any factors that may contribute to crashes.

To conclude, today's bills are a reflection of the power that unions have over this Labor government. The onus to prove that there is a causal link between the level of remuneration at the margin and safety on the roads has not been met. So even if I were prepared to accept that premise, we already have a raft of legislation in the states and the Commonwealth as well as new measures, some as yet untried, that have actually had proper consideration through the COAG process. These bills will simply undo all that hard work and further complicate the industry.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on the Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011, which is being debated cognately with the Road Safety (Consequential Amendments and Related Provisions) Bill 2011. At the heart of what we are debating here today is competition and how competition should be regulated. Competition is generally a beneficial thing. It improves quality, it generally makes firms more efficient and it provides benefits to consumers. Generally speaking competition is a fine thing. That is why we hear so many economists and so many politicians talking about it so often. You will often hear people singing its merits. But competition does have to be regulated appropriately. It is important in any game to have an umpire and a fair set of rules so that people play fairly.

We have known for some time that the transport industry does need special regulation if it is to be safe and, in particular, if people are to be treated appropriately and with dignity and if people are to be remunerated properly. This is because, although competition generally acts to have a positive effect on our economy, in this area it does not. The reason it generally does not act in a beneficial way in this industry is that we have a race to the bottom. That is what you get with competition in the transport industry. That is because we have two dominant players, Coles and Woolworths.

I had many dealings with Coles and Woolworths when I was in the retail union and in the retail industry. They are generally good employers. They have good sets of wages and conditions, particularly when you compare them to those of the rest of the world, but they are very tough on the people who deal with them. They are tough on suppliers and tough on people who sign contracts with them. I had some personal experience of this when I was a trolley collector. There was the same race to the bottom in trolley collection that we have seen in other areas of the retail business. Periodically, a contract would be put out for trolley collection services for Coles. In my case it was Coles Burnside, so I worked in a very well-to-do part of Adelaide. Contracts would be let and people would bid for those contracts, and it would simply come down to the price. That is what Coles looked for. There is not much of a quality issue in trolley collection: you either collect the trolleys or you do not. I was a young uni student at the time. What they generally compete on is wages. If there is not fair regulation of those wages then you will pretty soon find a race to the bottom. That is what happened in trolley collection in South Australia.

We had a situation where the Caretakers and Cleaners Award applied, because generally the company that did the cleaning of the store did the trolley collection. Then some bright spark discovered that, if you split those two services, you were no longer bound by the Caretakers and Cleaners Award. What pretty soon happened is that trolley collection in South Australia became award-free. I was employed under the Caretakers and Cleaners Award in 1994, getting something like 11 or 12 bucks an hour as a casual rate. My employer did not pay any overtime and he did not pay the penalty rates he was supposed to. That is why I joined the union at the time. We found that once those companies became award-free, once they did not feel even nominally obliged to pay the award rate, wages fell to $5 or $6 an hour—and they fell very quickly, almost overnight. So you had people earning $5 or $6 an hour collecting trolleys out the front of Coles and Woolies all over the state of South Australia. You still see this today. Fair Work Australia is to be commended on some of the underpayment matters they have dealt with since award protection has been extended to those workers yet again. So I have seen what happens in a race to the bottom situation with Coles and Woolworths. Again, I am not particularly seeking to demonise them. If someone stumps up a low contract price, they would be fools not to take it. But if, in that low contract price, you are building in unfairly low wages then that is something that the whole community should be concerned about.

We have seen this in the transport industry as well. It is an industry where you have owner-operators who do 60 per cent of the work and receive about 11 per cent of the income. We know that they are the people at the end of the chain, the people who get squeezed. Whenever people talk about efficiency or productivity in the transport industry, we know who is providing that. We know who has to work longer and work harder. There are not that many efficiency gains you can make in transport. At the end of the day you can squeeze the lemon only so hard. There are only so many costs you can reduce without starting to cut into your wages and other conditions at work. That is why we see that speed is a problem. It is not that drivers want to speed; it is that they have to to meet the conditions of their contract. It is not that they want to work long hours and be away from their friends and their families to do inordinate hours on the road; it is that they have to do long hours. It is not that they want to drive in a state of fatigue; it is because the contract requires them to. That is what this situation, this race to the bottom, generates. Of course no driver would voluntarily use illicit drugs. You would not want to think they would. It is the pressure they are put under, the economic and financial pressure, to meet payments on a truck, to meet the conditions of a contract and to try to get by in what is a cutthroat industry where someone is always going to try to cut in a little bit lower, push the envelope a bit harder, squeeze the lemon a bit tighter—or at least they think they can. Those are the sorts of tough conditions that will predominate in this industry if it is to be unregulated and if fair rules and a fair umpire are not to preside over it. We all have plenty of anecdotal stories, we have all heard them, about people who have bought trucks and have to pay banks, who have to meet the conditions of contracts and feel obligated because they are in so much debt—they are pursuing a legitimate dream that a lot of Australians have, which is to be their own boss and chart out their own economic future. It is hard to do that in an industry which is so cutthroat.

This parliament has an obligation to at least address this very difficult issue. It is not an easy issue to deal with through laws or regulations. It is still something that is going to require individuals to avail themselves of the rights that we are giving them. It will still take a strong trade union movement in this industry to make sure that these important intentions of the federal parliament are actually implemented, because we all know that once these sorts of cultures predominate they tend to be very hard to stamp out.

We know the road toll in this country takes a very bitter toll on the community, and we know that politicians on all sides want to reduce that toll. We have been very successful in doing so through regulation, through laws on drink driving, laws about drug driving, laws about seatbelts and laws about speed. Many of the same arguments that are made against this law, spurious arguments, have been made about those initiatives, but we know that they lower the road toll and lower the cost to the community. That cost is something like $2.7 billion, so it is a huge cost. In my own state of South Australia, we have seen some terrible accidents. I remember one a few years ago—this is a pretty graphic example of what we are talking about here—where a truck ploughed into a couple of cars and the driver was found to have been taking methamphetamine, or some sort of amphetamine, which had been given to him in his pay packet. So, you got your pay envelope, and in your pay envelope were the pills that you took, presumably to stay awake on the road and to meet the competitive pressures of the contracts that you were under. We have had some graphic examples in South Australia. That was probably five or six years ago, maybe a bit longer, but it is a very graphic example for the House about the problems in this industry.

I have been lobbied on this a fair bit over the years by the Transport Workers Union, including by Ray Wyatt and others in my state, who put forward a pretty passionate case. The TWU are not backwards in coming forwards, as my mother used to say. But the strongest stories come from the owner-drivers themselves, from the blokes who do the job on the road. These people have to load at transport yards and often have to put up with very long lines at retail warehouses and they get frustrated at those long lines. They have to put up with delays on our roads and meet pretty tough contracts as well. They have always been the most compelling advocates, I think, of this law.

To conclude, competition must be regulated in certain instances so that we do not have a race to the bottom. A race to the bottom is perhaps the worst form of competition that you can have. It means that the externalities, which in this case are the terrible road toll and the health, safety, welfare and wages of truck drivers, are put at risk if we have competition. They are the things that are not priced in if we have this sort of cutthroat competition at the bottom end. So competition must be regulated, it must have fair rules and it must have a fair umpire. These bills, the details of which have been spoken about for the House's benefit so I will not go over them again, are important not just for the transport industry but also for the people who drive on the roads. We want our truck drivers to be fairly remunerated. We want those owner-drivers who are the most entrepreneurial of small businessmen to be fairly compensated for their time and labour and the risk they take in borrowing money to buy trucks and the like. It is a risky endeavour and they should be compensated appropriately. This bill does that.

I just say to those opposite, I remember a quote from an old union man who was interviewed in a documentary about Red Ted Theodore. This old union bloke, who had been Red Ted's campaign manager, said, 'The conservatives have only ever had one idea—feed the donkey less and whip him harder.' My enduring hope is that the conservative parties do not revisit the rules they had in the 1930s, but rather follow the civilised capitalism of Menzies, the civilised liberalism of Menzies that my grandfather loved so much. I did not always agree with my grandfather, but he was a civilised conservative and I live in hope that the other side can perhaps find it in their common sense to support this commonsense bill.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Road safety is of paramount importance right across Australia, particularly in regional areas where every highway, byway and single lane country road is regularly used by trucks and semitrailers. These heavy vehicles cargo fresh food from paddocks, grain from silos, fuel from refineries, livestock from saleyards and resources from mines. If it needs to be carried, carted, dumped, hauled, moved, shifted or transported, there is every likelihood a truck or trailer will be the most economical, fastest and most reliable way of getting it from point A to point B. Tarcutta, in my electorate of Riverina, is on the Hume Highway midway between Sydney and Melbourne and has long been popular in the trucking industry as a stopping and changeover point for drivers. The Australian Truck Drivers Memorial, dedicated to truck drivers who have died on the Hume Highway as well as around the country, is situated in a park at Tarcutta. Established in 1994, the memorial contains hundreds of names of truckies who never made it to their destination. Many of those truckies are locals: drivers missed forevermore by partners; fathers whose children never really got to know them; truckies gone before their time. We mourn for them. We know what an important role they played in our transport industry. We appreciate the contribution they made in keeping Australia moving. We feel for their families and the colleagues they left behind.

Truck driving is a tough occupation. It takes a dedicated individual to keep on trucking—long hours, time away from home, days without their daily creature comforts that others take for granted, high expectations, tight deadlines. It is a high pressure job. Truck driving demands commitment, diligence, discipline and unwavering concentration. The consequences of a momentary lapse in judgment or of concentration can be catastrophic. We have all seen the dreadful and heartbreaking television footage and newspaper images of what happens when trucks and cars collide. We all want the road toll to be reduced. We all want loved ones—professional drivers and any road users just going about their daily lives, shopping, mothers taking children to and from school, tourists, whatever the case might be—to return home safely.

The Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011 and the Road Safety Remuneration (Consequential Amendments and Related Provisions) Bill 2011 will create a new tribunal, empowered to inquire into sectors, issues and practices within the road transport industry and ensure mandatory minimum rates of pay and related conditions for employed and self-employed truck drivers. Since being elected in 2007, the Labor government has been steadily moving towards the introduction of so-called 'safe' rates in the heavy vehicle industry after a long and drawn-out campaign by the powerful Transport Workers Union.

A safe rate, according to the union, is a proposal for an enforceable rate of remuneration for transport workers, determined by the government or other body deemed appropriate, to reduce accidents involving the heavy vehicle industry. But no real research has been done to prove beyond doubt that there is a link between payment to truck drivers and road accidents. The very fact that carriage of this legislation has moved from the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations exposes the real agenda behind these bills.

This is about giving trade unions more power over the transport industry and control over drivers. In time, this will filter through to cover all forms of drivers—courier drivers, mail contractors and the like. There is no causal link between money and danger to drivers. The government has revealed, only in the past hour, amendments which were apparently approved by the Labor caucus—when it was not quelling internal ructions—a fortnight ago. The lateness of these amendments is unsatisfactory and is a complete rejection of the alleged new paradigm under which this parliament is supposed to be operating.

The transport minister and the Transport Workers Union say these bills will improve safety in the road transport industry, claiming the support of Linfox, 'other good companies'—as the minister termed them, and the Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association to back up their argument. The purported link between pay rates and safety outcomes has been heavily questioned by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Australian Industry Group, Australian Logistics Council, New South Wales branch of the Australian Trucking Association and the Toll Group. The Australian Livestock Markets Association is opposed to these bills because the legislation will cover its members for services which they provide gratuitously but, if these bills are enacted, they will stop doing or will have to impose a charge for.

In his 1 March media conference, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—also known as the minister for trade union empowerment—said:

It isn't good enough, and this country is smart enough to prevent a set of circumstances where drivers are rushing to fulfil unrealistic deadlines, they're perhaps required not to be paid for waiting time. They get very low rates of pay—some are around the order of $30,000 a year, which is barely the minimum wage in Australia. Sometimes, in order to meet the very tough deadlines, they have to take illicit substances. We think we can make safer roads for our drivers and their families, but we also believe that safer rates mean safer roads for all Australians.

Truck drivers do not have to take illicit substances. Some might choose to do so, and that is indeed unfortunate and dangerous for themselves and other road users. But the minister used very emotive language to push his message which does not paint an entirely accurate picture of the real situation. To suggest truck drivers get, as he put it, 'very low rates of pay' is perhaps using too broad a brush. Those earning only $30,000 per annum would, I suggest, be working only very casually, certainly not full-time, which was the inference the minister was making.

These bills have been criticised on a number of fronts. No connection has been made between pay rates and road safety. These bills establish another bureaucracy and will mean more red tape for businesses already bound by some of the most stringent and complex regulation in the country. These bills undermine the concept of an independent contractor. The bills' definition of road transport is way too broad. What area of the transport sector will the legislation, if passed, reach? The bills undermine other legislation being developed, including the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator and national occupational health and safety laws. The scope of road safety remuneration orders is also too broad.

These bills will generate additional confusion in the industry as, constitutionally, they will cover only 80 per cent of employee drivers and 60 per cent of owner operators. I note the member for Ryan spoke of the need for additional road funding to promote road safety. She is, of course, very correct. Governments serious about road safety ought to be doing more to improve roads and I call on federal Labor to do just that. The member for Gippsland wrote to transport companies within his electorate to canvass their views about these bills. They expressed their fears about the costs of such measures as well as doubts about the real reasons behind the moves. Freight-carrying companies in the Riverina share these genuine concerns about costs and hidden agendas.

The member for Wakefield spoke of drivers having to speed to meet what he called cutthroat competitive deadlines. With the point-to-point average speed cameras for heavy vehicles and fixed and mobile radar these days, such drivers will not last long in the heavy vehicle industry. These bills will no doubt carry a hefty wage hike for small trucking firms and the like. These companies are already finding their bottom lines stretched to the limit, particularly in regional Australia. Last year's live cattle export fiasco hit the transport industry in western and northern Australia hard, and the carbon tax from 1 July will make another severe dent in profit margins. As with much of its legislation, the government wants to push these bills through so that they are functioning by 1 July 2012. Given the limited number of parliamentary sitting weeks before that date, the government is again rushing through legislation and failing to appropriately assess the concerns of industry.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Regardless of our positions in this chamber, everyone would agree that it is fundamentally the right of every single person that if they leave for work safely they should return home safely. It is simply inconceivable that anyone could disagree with that proposition. However, how do we guarantee that—and I am mindful of some of the comments by the member for Grayndler and Minister for Infrastructure and Transport—when we are told that truck driving is the most dangerous industry in Australia by a factor of 10. The costs of these deaths to the country is about $2 billion per year.

In the 12 months to June last year there were 210 fatal crashes involving trucks. Again, we say that when people leave home they should be able to return home in the same way they left—safely, in one piece. But heavy trucks account for 2.5 per cent of all vehicle registrations and 7.5 per cent of vehicle kilometres travelled, but they are involved in 15 per cent of all fatal crashes. The official record keeper, the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, says that speed, drugs, alcohol and fatigue are often to blame. I also turn to the fact that the situation continues to get worse, not better.

I am mindful of the submission that the Transport Workers Union made to the inquiry into the Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011 and the Road Safety Remuneration (Consequential Amendments and Related Provisions) Bill 2011. In their submission they say:

No other industry is responsible for 330 deaths in a year. No other industry injures 5,350 people per year at the rate of 31 per day. This is an industry in the midst of a severe crisis in safety.

It is simply not getting any better because, if you look at the three years to March 2010, fatal crashes involving heavy, rigid trucks increased an average of 0.3 per cent a year. It may sound like a small amount to others, but if you are involved in that, if you are part of that 0.3 per cent and there is a family that is affected by that, you feel that in a major way. Each road death costs approximately $1.7 million. Each injury in an accident costs over $408,000. When you look the social costs of those deaths, injuries, illnesses and family breakdowns and at the pain and suffering, at some point someone has to pay for this. It is a huge burden, not just in an economic sense but in a social sense as well.

Is it getting any better? You only need to turn to some of the recent incidents. These were picked up in the Daily Telegraph where it was quoted that earlier this year people had been found to be tampering with the speed limiters that prevent them from going over the speed limit. Trucks exceeding 115 kilometres per hour could be pulled over immediately. There have been incidents where people have been found to be tampering with their trucks for no other reason than to meet deadlines and ease the pressures that are on them. There is wide community recognition of the problem, and we have had countless inquiries. I would liken it to an excuse for inaction. People understand and get the simple proposition that if we improve safety in the trucking industry we make roads safer for everyone—for the people who travel on those roads but, importantly, for people in the trucking industry and their families.

In 2008, the National Transport Commission—the NTC—investigated the issue of safe payments in the road transport industry and their work spurred the development of these bills. It aimed to provide a valuation with recommendations for the improvement of truck driver payment methods, working conditions and career structures to address safety issues. The widespread concern is that risks are taken and that safety is compromised to meet the demands of the job or to secure pay outcomes. One statistic that flawed me was the one that suggested that about 30 per cent of owner drivers are paid below the award rate. No-one else would accept that. If anyone else in the general community was paid that amount of money there would be an uproar.

Again, I refer to the submission made by the TWU where they had a survey conducted last year that illustrated some of the dangerous on-road behaviours. Forty-eight per cent of drivers report almost one day a week in unpaid waiting time, and for delivery drivers it is more than 10 hours a week. Fifty-six per cent of owner drivers have had to forgo vehicle maintenance because of economic pressure and the need to keep working and the high cost of repairs. Another 27 per cent felt they had to drive too fast, and nearly 40 per cent felt pressured to drive longer than legally allowed. This is what people are saying directly from the industry, the pressures that people at the coalface feel they have to operate under. The NTC report looked at the link between remuneration and road safety, and that link was quite clear. The report found:

…the overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that commercial/industrial practices affecting road transport play a direct and significant role—

I will repeat that—

…a direct and significant role in causing hazardous practices. There is solid survey evidence linking payment levels and systems to crashes, speeding, driving while fatigued and drug use.

Yet we have the member for Riverina coming in here a few moments ago and saying that there is not enough proof. For them it has not been proved beyond any shadow of a doubt, despite all the work done, that there is any sort of link when clearly, in the absence of any contrary evidence put forward in the debate by those opposite, the work that has been undertaken shows otherwise.

It is worth making the point at this juncture that, through countless inquiries, responses to incidents, responses to the media interest that has been aroused by this, and in dealing with families that have been traumatised, there is one organisation that has continuously, passionately and determinedly pressed the case for something to be done. I want to place on the record my admiration for the Transport Workers Union of Australia—in particular Tony Sheldon, Michael Kane, who I notice up in the gallery, and my friend and colleague the New South Wales Secretary Wayne Forno. In years to come, people will be able to say that the work done by this organisation has saved their lives or spared them from injury. There are people in this chamber who say that too much power has been wielded by one organisation in this matter; but to be honest I thank God that that power has been exercised because families have not had to be traumatised by the death of their loved ones, whether they are the people driving those vehicles or general commuters involved in accidents. I congratulate the TWU for the work they have done.

The NTC report formed the platform for these bills. If you look at the objectives of the legislation, there are a number of things it seeks to do. I want in particular to draw attention to the fact that it aims to promote safety and fairness in the road transport industry by, for example, ensuring road transport drivers do not have remuneration-related incentives to work in an unsafe manner; removing remuneration-related incentives and pressures that contribute to unsafe work practices; ensuring that road transport drivers are paid for their work, including loading and unloading vehicles or waiting for someone else to load or unload their vehicles; and developing and applying reasonable and enforceable standards to the road transport industry supply chain to ensure the safety of road transport drivers.

We also seek to set up a Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal to ensure that we promote the objectives of the act and safety and fairness in the industry. It will ensure that work is done in an evidence-based and research-focused way. It will also create determinations known as road safety remuneration orders which will be in addition to any existing rights that employed drivers have under industrial instruments or that owner-drivers have under their contracts for service. These bills will ensure that the years of talk, of hand wringing, of saying something has to be done will end. We will make sure that there is something in place to resolve the issues that people in the trucking industry have had to deal with for years.

In spite of all this, when we finally get to a point where we can take action, we still have those that try to propagate myths about what this legislation will do. Some suggest that safe rates will cost consumers, ignoring the reality that every single death costs $2 million; every injury costs over $400,000. Who do people believe bears this cost? This cost is heavily borne by the families involved but it is also, ultimately, borne by the public. It is spurious to claim that the implementation of this bill would lead to costs when these costs are already being borne. The aim is to reduce the costs, economic and social, on those families. There are people that say that voluntary systems would work better, when there is simply no evidence to suggest that the voluntary systems that have been in place so far have assisted in any way, shape or form. They have had no impact to date. The death rate, the injury rate and the incident rate continue to grow. Worse still is the argument put forward by those opposite that there is no proof that remuneration and safety are linked, when in fact a huge volume of work has been undertaken to show this. I will read an excerpt from the NTC report, quoting Professor Michael Belzer from the University of Michigan:

The point estimates indicate that if mileage rate were to increase to $0.37 per mile, drivers would reduce their weekly hours to be in compliance with current regulations. At this rate, drivers are being compensated at a rate sufficient for them to be able to satisfy their income requirements without being induced to work in excess of mandated law.

Those opposite said in a dissenting report that they were unconvinced safe rates would lead to an improvement in road safety outcomes. They also said that the link between remuneration and safety in the transport industry has not been definitively established. They suggested that improving road infrastructure and enforcing existing laws would achieve safety improvements. This is simply an excuse to know, not act. It would be improper to reveal too much of the committee's consideration of the bills, but there was an attempt to work together within that committee. However, the dissenting report betrays the fact that none of those opposite can point to anything that they did in their time in government—when they had an opportunity to deal with this—or that they could do now, as an opposition, that would improve this situation and avoid deaths. Those opposite would rather find ways to delay—for example, requiring us to be able to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is a link between remuneration and safety. Until the point that we could do that, we would still have people in the trucking industry and other people using those roads dying to satisfy their demand for absolute proof that there is a link between the two—when huge volumes of work have been done to prove just that. I would argue that, if they oppose this legislation, those opposite are absolutely compelled to tell this chamber one thing that they would do to save people's lives and prevent injury. Do not tell us existing laws have to be enforced better, because the evidence suggests that even to this point people are abusing the law by either playing with speed limiters or engaging in drug use because of the very pressures they have to operate under.

Those opposite have to get serious. They have to look at the families of those truckers who have died and the families who have been injured in road accidents involving trucks and explain to them why further inaction is a recipe for anything good in the general community. They are compelled to demonstrate to this chamber what they would do to improve the situation. (Time expired)

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011 and the Road Safety (Consequential Amendments and Related Provisions) Bill 2011. Firstly, I would like to express my admiration for our nation's truck drivers. These guys—and some women—are the salt of the earth. They work long hours in isolated conditions and often in a very isolated environment away from family and friends. It is a very dangerous occupation. It is an industry in which over the last couple of years we have seen around 250 people killed and 1,000 more seriously injured. I am proud to say that on this side of the House there are several members who hold licences to drive heavy vehicles while on the other side, in the so-called workers' party, there is an absolute dearth of those who even know what a clutch is.

The purpose of this bill is to create a new government bureaucracy, to be called the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which will inquire into sector issues and practices in the road transport industry and issue orders and set mandatory rates of pay and related conditions for employed and self-employed drivers. However, it should be noted that this bill will create confusion in the industry, as constitutionally the bill will not apply to over 40 per cent of owner-operators and over 20 per cent of employee drivers.

The reason behind this bill is that many of our nation's truck drivers today are being placed under undue economic pressure. One of the inherent difficulties that our nation's truck drivers face is delays—delays through roadworks, delays through accidents, delays through rain and delays through being caught in peak hour traffic. These delays can easily happen in a journey on any of our nation's roads, whether it is just across town or from one side of our continent to the other. Of the few examples I have noted, there are obviously a range of controllable and uncontrollable actions. The penalty clauses forced upon drivers, sometimes enforced from outside their contracts, do not make such distinctions.

When looking at the causes of delays, I need look no further than two nights ago when I, along with many of my New South Wales colleagues, was driving down to Canberra late on Monday night for this parliamentary sitting. There were roadworks at Marulan and the traffic was banked up for 10 kilometres. Whilst sitting in the traffic jam for over an hour meant little to me—I simply arrived here in Canberra an hour later—I could not help but notice the number of trucks that were lined up and experiencing the same set of circumstances. But what was only a slight annoyance to me was actually stripping money from the pockets of these blokes in their trucks. It was snatching food from their dinner tables, because these blokes are not fortunate enough to have a job where they sit around each night with their family. It is a tough job they have to do.

Marulan is located midway between Sydney and Canberra and it is an important trucking stop on the Sydney to Melbourne trip. That chaos on Monday night came from about 200 metres of a single lane on the Hume Highway being closed outside of peak hours. That may have been amplified by the increased road use of New South Wales parliamentarians and their staff making their way to Canberra or even Canberrans who had taken the day off for Canberra Day returning from holidays. But this was not even peak hour and we saw trucks held up for several hours, which would have delayed all the trucking between Sydney and Melbourne by several hours that day.

While these delays are inherent in the nature of the industry, the supermarket duopoly have been taking advantage of their centralised power to hold trucking companies and our drivers to ransom by giving them unreasonable deadlines and penalising them if they are delayed by even just a few minutes. I have even heard of one instance of a company being fined $50,000 because they were no more than a few minutes late with a delivery to one of the supermarket duopolists. What did the duopolist say when the company complained? They simply said, 'What can you do—take us to court?' That is unfortunately the market power that the supermarket duopoly have. They are able to act outside our laws and outside commercial practices.

Even Lindsay Fox has commented on the undue market power of the supermarket duopoly, accusing them of dictating terms and 'expecting everything for nothing'. In a recent interview in the Australian newspaper the Linfox founder offered his thoughts on the dominance of the two major supermarkets. Despite him having recently signed a new five-year deal with Coles, these are the comments he made. He said:

They are too big … You can't dictate the terms and conditions of what people have got to trade with you. And they are getting to that stage. They are trying to dictate to everyone …

They are expecting everything for nothing. They are going to crucify the farmers, crucify the bread manufacturers and if you spoke to most of the consumer goods manufacturers at the moment, you would get a very mixed response about the aspects of dealing with these companies.

We all believe in a free market, but a free market means just that: it means freedom. It means freedom in contract negotiation. It means freedom for one party to stand up and simply say 'Get stuffed' and pack their bags and walk away. But when the market becomes overly concentrated, that very freedom is taken away and others in the supply chain become nothing other than economic serfs.

So the real solution to the problem we have with the undue market pressure being put on our truck drivers—the unreasonable delivery times they are made to adhere to and the unreasonable waiting times—is what I would call the Standard Oil option—that is, to reverse the undue market concentration that has been occurring in this market for years and years. In any legislation we need to make sure we are addressing the cause of the problem and not putting a bandaid over the wound. It is obvious from the speeches from both sides of the House that the root cause of the problem—the economic pressure that is being put on our truck drivers—is the growing market concentration of the supermarket duopoly. These bills, unfortunately, do not tackle that root cause, and that is something we need to address.

I now turn to some of the other pressures our trucking industry will face in the future. While these bills look at the economic pressure on the transport industry, let us not forget the pain that every single member of this government voted to inflict on our transport industry with the world's largest carbon tax. From 1 July 2014 there will be an extra impost of 6.85c per litre on the cost of diesel. What that means for every owner-operator and for every truck that makes on average three round trips a week between Sydney and Melbourne is that $5,000 will be ripped out of their pockets. How can members of this government come in here and talk about helping truck drivers when their own policies are going to add $5,000 a year in costs onto them?

There are other issues we need to look at to improve the safety of our truck drivers. It is not just accidents. Truck drivers also face diesel pollution. We know diesel pollution is hazardous to human health. The groups that are at particular risk are industries that are especially involved in trucking. For truck drivers it is not only the pollution from their own diesel trucks but the elevated background pollution where they work—in ports, from cargo handling equipment, from ships and from locomotives. A recent investigation in California by the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, analysing the air quality inside truck cabs, revealed alarmingly high levels of diesel pollution and a threat to our drivers' health. Diesel engines emit a toxic brew of particulate matter as smog-forming nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. Diesel exhaust is estimated to be responsible for 70 per cent of the total cancer risks from air pollution. Numerous studies have documented this risk. According to a recent California Air Resources Board report, trucks involved in the movement of goods were responsible for more than half of the estimated 2,400 premature deaths attributable to diesel exhaust from the Californian freight industry. Also, the monitoring of air inside cabs has found an alarmingly high level of pollution.

Again, how can we assist in making the health of our drivers better? What can we do? Firstly, diesel pollution can be reduced by regular maintenance of trucks—making sure that trucks are at their best performance. But how can we do that if in this parliament we are legislating to make truck drivers pay an extra $5,000 a year through the carbon tax? There are of course other things we can do. We can limit idling time and the time they spend waiting in queues. But, again, we cannot do that unless we balance the market power between our independent drivers and our supermarket duopoly. Too often we hear that by having such a concentrated market we get market efficiencies.

If I operate a warehouse and I have trucks coming to me, it makes my operation very efficient if I can have the trucks I need to unload lined up one by one, so that when I unload one truck another truck pulls up. That makes my operation efficient, so that is how I want to do it. On the other hand, when drivers can be so easily delayed on our roads today, that puts the burden back on those drivers—which makes them more inefficient. They have to plan their trips, they have to leave hours earlier than they normally would and they have to wait in queues, simply to make that warehouse more efficient. So while that warehouse may become more efficient, what actually happens is that our entire supply chain becomes less efficient. These are the problems we have when our market becomes overly concentrated.

The other issue we need to look at is how to improve the health, wellbeing and safety of our nation's truck drivers—and of course it gets back to diesel fuel. The diesel fuel that we currently burn in trucks has very high levels of particulate matter. There is a way of reducing that, and that is through the process of coal liquefaction. We have the capability here in Australia, with our supplies of brown coal, especially in the Latrobe Valley, to produce diesel fuel through coal liquefaction. This would have particulates reduced by about 40 per cent. If we were able to do that it would substantially increase our ability to make our trucking safer. It would reduce the particulate matter in the cabs of trucks and make drivers' health a lot better, and that is what these bills also fail to address.

In the remaining minutes I have I will say a few kind words about Mr Tony Sheldon, the head of the TWU. I do not see him up in the gallery, but I believe he has been in Parliament House for the last couple of days. I believe he has truck drivers' best interests at heart. However, I think these bills need a bit of work, Tony. I do not think they are quite there. I think we need to look at and tackle the undue power of the supermarket duopoly, because we want to see all Australian truck drivers have a fair go. We want to make sure that the truck drivers of Australia have hope, reward and opportunity, as the rest of us do, and I hope we can achieve that in the future.

Peter Slipper (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would ask honourable members to sit down, because the honourable member is about to be advised by me that, it being 7 pm, I am about to propose the question that the House do now adjourn. The honourable member will have the opportunity of continuing his remarks at an appropriate time.