Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The Road Transport Reform (Dangerous Goods) Repeal Bill 2009 repeals the Road Transport Reform (Dangerous Goods) Act 1995. It is being implemented to allow the Australian Capital Territory to implement the seventh edition of the Australian Dangerous Goods Code and enact model legislation in accordance with an intergovernmental agreement. This bill continues the previous government’s work and commitment to transport regulatory reform in the area of transport of dangerous goods by road and rail. The ACT cannot implement the model legislation until the Commonwealth repeals the 1995 act. The repeal being enacted by this bill will come into effect on a day to be fixed by proclamation to coincide with the passage of legislation by the ACT government.

The coalition is satisfied that the bill is a necessary piece of housekeeping as it applies the approach to regulatory reform agreed to by the former government. Unfortunately, the effort the Labor Party is making in its own right to address these fundamental matters of economic reform is far more disappointing. The Productivity Commission has estimated that the cost to Australia’s GDP of conflicting transport regulations is something like $2.4 billion. The National Transport Commission in 2006 found that, after one decade of effort to pursue regulatory reform, only one-third of oversize and overmass provisions that apply to heavy vehicles have been implemented in a nationally consistent way.

We mentioned in the parliament before, in relation to other legislation, some baffling examples of regulatory transport inconsistencies. One such example is that a truck operator carrying hay bales and loaded to its maximum allowable three-metre width in Victoria will be overwidth in New South Wales where the maximum width is 2.83 metres. So a Victorian farmer who loads his truck with hay as wide as is legally possible in Victoria would not be able to drive across the border into New South Wales. That stupidity cannot continue in our federation. The coalition has previously mentioned the failure by the states to take up in a uniform way the heavy-vehicle driver fatigue reforms agreed to by the Australian Transport Council in early 2007 and rolled out from September 2008. It is disappointing that Labor governments in Tasmania and the Northern Territory have not yet applied the fatigue reforms that were agreed by the Australian Transport Council. It is also astounding that New South Wales and Victoria, which have applied the reforms from 29 September last year, have introduced variations. These include differences between Victoria and New South Wales in logbook requirements and in defence provisions should a breach of fatigue regulations occur.

The coalition is also concerned about variation between the states in opening up their roads to the highly efficient B-triple vehicle combinations. In spite of agreements to do so, New South Wales refuses to make a serious effort to open up its road system to these vehicles. Victoria is also lagging, only allowing B-triple use between Broadmeadows and Geelong. Unfortunately, the failure of the New South Wales government to implement the higher mass limit reforms agreed to by the Australian Transport Council in 2000 has made it difficult for truck operators to realise this investment and has added to the costs of fleets operating across the South Australian and Victorian borders and into New South Wales. These are just a couple of examples in what is a very serious problem in economic inefficiency in Australia.

Regrettably, the Labor government does a lot of talking about it at a lot of meetings, but precious little is done. We know that the Labor Party is good at running up debts, creating something like a $315 billion deficit in our country—a liability of about $15,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. We also know that the Labor Party is pretty good at trashing programs aimed at regional Australia and turning them into election slush funds aimed at urban seats.