Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak this morning about the trucking industry and its safety. I do so with some familiarity with the industry. My father-in-law is a truck driver. My uncle is a truck driver. I have seen firsthand how important safety is in that industry. It has a much higher fatality rate than most industries. The trucking industry has about 10 times the average fatality rate of any other industry. It is something that families always live with when they have members of their family in that industry driving long distances. Right now, my father-in-law is somewhere between Wagga Wagga and Lightning Ridge on another long-haul drive.

In the 12 months to March this year, 207 people were unfortunately killed in 180 heavy vehicle accidents. It is a very serious issue. Two years ago this place established a Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal to help try to deal with these issues—the so-called safe rates legislation. At the time I remember thinking, 'I do not exactly know how this is going to deal with safety.' I remember it going through. It was something that was pushed by the Transport Workers Union at the time. They were able to get that up through the then government.

We heard last week at the royal commission how the president of that union, Mr Tony Sheldon, had used money in the McLean Forum and that he had been able to control and leverage those funds to help him control other unions—such as the Health Services Union, the Flight Attendants' Association of Australia and also the Electrical Trades Union—by funding campaigns. That obviously gives him a fair amount of influence over unions in this country. The evidence at the royal commission did seem to say that. But it is not just unions, of course, because when he has control of those unions he also has control of preselection to the Australian Labor Party. If he has control over preselection for the Australian Labor Party, he has control of the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. Unions were able to leverage that influence to get a lot of things out of the former government. We saw a lot of those things go through parliament last year.

One of the things that went through was this safe rates legislation in 2012. We know that they did use that influence because there was a meeting at Kirribilli House in November 2011 between Julia Gillard and union bosses. We know that Mr Ferguson said of that time:

It was another Kirribilli agreement … It was the deathknell for her government. She gave the unions everything they wanted … It was 'lock in behind me and I will deliver for you'.

And she did deliver. She delivered this safe rates legislation, which was simply a sop to the Transport Workers Union. It has not delivered any real benefits for the trucking industry or truckers themselves.

There is no evidence that higher rates of pay lead to more safety. There was an OECD report in 2011 which broke down the causes of heavy vehicle collisions. It reported on the results of an International Road Transport Union study. It showed that about 85 per cent of accidents involving heavy vehicles do not involve driver fault. Only for a quarter of those cases was the heavy vehicle driver at fault. A similar conclusion was reached in the Australian context in a 2003 study, which found that in 82 per cent of motor vehicle accidents involving heavy vehicles the driver of that vehicle was not at fault.

I am not a truck driver; I am an economist. I always felt that, when you increase hourly wages or pay, you increase the supply of labour. You actually encourage people to drive more, not less. The whole reason for the legislation was to try to encourage people to drive less and therefore be safer on the roads. It was an admirable goal. But I did not quite see how those two things were linked, and neither did the regulatory impact statement of the government of the time. The government of the time had to do a regulatory impact statement on this legislation. The regulatory impact statement itself found no link between higher rates of pay and safety. It evaluated two options and they came at a net cost of $44 million in one case and $228.4 million in the other case. There was no evidence for the legislation's establishment.

But establishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal has been very good for one group. It has been very good for those people connected to the Transport Workers Union, because there have been seven members appointed to the tribunal and they have done quite well. There is the president, who is the Hon. Jennifer Action. Her husband was Bill Shorten's office manager.