Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow Senator Campbell and his comments in relation to the report Workforce challenges in the transport industry. As he outlined, the report is unanimous. It did take a few visits and inspections to highlight to a number of people on the committee the skills shortage in the transport industry—and not in just road transport. I compliment the committee chair, Senator Troeth, for her excellent conduct of the inquiry and for putting herself out to go to a variety of places to see how transport operates in this country. Of course, I also compliment the officers of the committee, John Carter and Monika Kruesmann.

As Senator Campbell said, the report is unanimous—and I think that is unique for the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education. Most of the reports, as I recall, have not been unanimous—in fact, there have been significant minority reports in relation to a number of the inquiries conducted by this committee. As Senator Campbell outlined, this is just the beginning and should not be seen as a panacea for the difficulties that employers are facing with skills shortages in the transport industry. I am sure that Senator Sterle will comment on this as well. To a large degree, particularly in the road transport industry, they have no-one to blame but themselves.

The organisations that represent workers in that industry—whether it is the TWU, the RBTU or others—have highlighted for some time the difficulties that are being faced as a result of these skills shortages. What is the answer of these companies to those shortages? They think there are two answers. Firstly, they think it is good to rort the system at the moment for traineeships and just train existing employees. Most of the money that goes to these traineeships goes to existing employees; 90 per cent of the money that these companies have access to goes to people already on their payroll. They do not go down any avenue to make sure that they have at least the 4,500 entrants that are required to come into the industry each year. So who is to blame? They are, themselves. What is their other solution? Their other solution is to try to import truck drivers through the use of the 457 visa, which is also commented on in the report. We must say that we do not recommend that this option be considered.

Whilst conducting the inquiry, we saw some scary things occurring, including the inability of the road transport industry in particular to invest in the future. Senator George Campbell talked about the intermodal changes in road, rail et cetera. We went to Australian National in Melbourne, and they told us that they cannot get men to drive trucks for car carrying, because they are not available—they are just not there—so they have to fit out trains to cart cars across from the west to the east. It is not any cheaper to put it on rail and it is not cheaper to go by road—it is almost neutral—but there are no men or women out there to do this work. I hope that the government and the department look at the recommendations in the report. They were considered seriously by the members of the committee. We see this as one way to point the government and the industry in the direction in which to deal with the pending skills shortage in the road transport industry.