Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to oppose this legislation to abolish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. I oppose this legislation, which we have not even seen, which is being rushed through—rammed through. We are hearing now that the whole debate is going to be gagged and guillotined in an hour and a quarter's time.

The establishment of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal was good legislation. It was good legislation because it was about improving safety for us all. Abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is yet another attack by this government on the rights of hardworking Australians who deserve the right to be paid, or to pay themselves, a decent wage—a fair pay—for their work as truck drivers.

The fact that this legislation is being rushed through tonight—even more than we thought was going to be the case, with the legislation being guillotine tonight—just shows the strength of the government's attack on ordinary hardworking Australians. The reason I am passionate about this, and passionate about fact that the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal was supported by good legislation, is that this is about people's lives. In talking tonight, I reflect upon the fact that, in the last year, 194 people lost their lives on Australian roads because of a crash involving a truck. Every single life lost is a tragedy, but it continues to happen. This legislation is about everyone of those fatalities. Every time you hear a news report on the radio or the TV about one of these fatalities, you can just imagine getting a phone call telling you that your son or daughter has been killed in a crash and your life changes in a single moment.

We have probably all thought of it, but it is a risk that we take—whether we travel by truck, by car or even by bike. Anyone who has driven a car knows the feeling when you are driving down a country road and a truck appears in the distance. As it powers past you, you have got to hold onto the steering wheel. The car rattles a bit in the wind produced from the sheer mass of the truck, but you have made it past safely. As for the truck drivers, I can only imagine the weight of responsibility every time they jump into the cabin and turn the key in the ignition. These truck drivers are doing their jobs—delivering the goods that we need—and doing it for the families; and, to the best of their ability, they keep everyone else on the road safe.

But, too often, truck drivers can be doing nothing wrong on the road when they are inadvertently involved in a collision. They might survive the crash, because they are in the larger vehicle, but the emotional scars can last a lifetime. Our truck drivers go to great lengths to do their job. I have spoken to many truck drivers over many years. I live in Footscray, and many trucks ply the streets of Footscray and Yarraville going to from the port. I have engaged with truck drivers over the last two decades. When I talk to truck drivers, they tell me about the immense pressure they are under. They tell me that they are not being paid enough and thus find themselves forced to cut corners, to skip breaks, to work incredibly long hours or to take up a second job. They find themselves forced to work up to 18 hours, often at night. They find themselves forced to take uppers in order to stay awake. They find themselves doing things that are against regulations, against all of the controls. They are doing that and they are pushing the system. They are running the risk of breaking these laws because they feel they need to do it in order to make enough money to make ends meet.

Our job in this place is to make sure these drivers do not feel under pressure to do unsafe things. Truck drivers should not be forced to work ridiculous hours to put food on the family table. They should not be forced to cut corners because it is the beginning of the school year and their kids need new shoes, books or uniforms. Enabling truck drivers to have minimum rates, a fair amount of pay for the work they do, is what the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal was set up to do. It was set up so that truck drivers were not in a race to the bottom, were not spiralling to the bottom and feeling that they were so desperate to get that next job that they had to undercut somebody else, offer to do it cheaper and, because of that, work longer hours, take risks and cut corners. The abolition of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal will be a cruel blow to anybody who has been affected by road trauma involving trucks and a cruel blow to the many additional people who will be affected by road trauma in the future. They will have their colleagues, their friends, their sons, their daughters or their parents unnecessarily involved in a road crash because truck drivers were cutting corners and taking risks.

The abolition of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal will be a cruel blow to other people on our roads. I am thinking of the intersection of two main roads, Geelong Road and Moore Street in Footscray, just around the corner from me and the number of times you see trucks running red lights. I am thinking of the number of times that the fence of the house at that corner has been smashed to smithereens because of trucks running red lights, speeding and doing their best to do their job as quickly as possible. We know, from talking to them, that the reason they are doing that is that they have to get their load somewhere as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to have their job.

The abolition of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is going to be a cruel blow to people travelling on trains. In particular, I am thinking of the rail bridge near Footscray Station, in Napier Street Footscray, which is the most smashed into bridge anywhere in Melbourne. It gets smashed into when drivers, for some reason, forget how high their trucks are—and, oops, they do not quite fit under the bridge! Why is that the case? It is because of the pressure that these drivers are under. It is because they have to get from the port to the container yard as quickly as possible. They have not even stopped and paid attention to how high the container loaded on the truck is and that it is not actually going to fit under that railway bridge at Footscray Station.

I am thinking of the speeding trucks that rush past me when I am on my bike in Moore Street Footscray. I fear my life. Again, they run red lights and put other road users at risk. I think of the people, living in residential streets in the suburbs around me—in Footscray and Yarraville—who are trying to sleep but cannot sleep, despite the fact the there are curfews on the roads around them and regulations in place that are meant to say, 'No, trucks aren't allowed on these roads at night.' But there are truck drivers who—again, because they are not being paid enough—are desperate for the job. They are desperate to do it quickly and they are desperate to drop off their load so they can quickly go out and get another one. They break the rules, and they do it because it is impossible for them to survive. It is impossible for them to be earning a decent enough wage without cutting corners and without speeding. They do it to survive.

How do we stop these unsafe practices? There are obviously a number of factors that come together to make our roads safer, but fundamentally we have to change the system so that the incentives to be going too fast, cutting corners and breaking the rules no longer exist. Yes, we need more enforcement of existing regulations, but we have had those regulations in place for years—some of them for decades—and they keep getting broken because the incentive to break those regulations is there. The incentive of trying to earn a decent amount of money is there, and it is why those regulations are broken.

By saying that we can fix all this just by enforcing these existing regulations is just treating the symptoms rather than treating the fundamental problem that many of the drivers driving trucks on our roads are not being paid enough for the trips that they are driving. They are not being paid enough so that at the end of a day's work, or at the end of a week's work they have enough money in their pockets to survive. Yes, we need to have safer trucks. There is no doubt about that. We need to have safer roads, but the evidence that we have heard at the road safety committee has told us that you need to be looking at the whole system that operates together. You just cannot pick out one thing and hope that that is going to be your silver bullet. We cannot just hope that enforcing regulations will be enough. We cannot just hope that having safer trucks will be enough. We cannot just hope that having safer roads will be enough.

You need to have everything working together, and that is why the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal was set up to add the other piece of the jigsaw puzzle by ensuring that if you had minimum rates of pay then truck drivers, after working a hard day's work or a hard week's work, would have enough money and would be earning a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. We have to pay them properly, otherwise they are at risk of being undercut. Without minimum rates that is what happens. Without minimum rates you can have truck drivers who are determined that, as an owner-driver, they are going to make sure that they charge enough for the trip that they are doing. But then they find that there is somebody else who is just that little bit more desperate than them who undercuts them, and so it is a race to the bottom—a spiralling to the bottom. This comes to the crunch of why we have regulations. Particularly when we are looking after workers' rights, we have regulations for minimum rates of pay. We have awards. We have enterprise bargains. We have these regulations in order that people can be assured that they will be getting a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.

The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal exists in the interests of our truck drivers and the safety of everyone on our roads. Abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is going to make our roads less safe. We supported establishing the tribunal because the Greens believe that everyone deserves a safe workplace and our roads should be safe for everyone. This is supported by study after study. Study after study shows that you need to be working on all of the factors that I have talked about; but they particularly show that safety on the roads for truck drivers and everyone else is related to truck drivers' wages and conditions, and by improving wages and conditions for owner-drivers we make our roads safer for everyone. The Greens supported the tribunal and we welcomed the tribunal's decision for safe rates when it was handed down.

The other aspect of abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is that it fits into the government's overall agenda, and particularly the debates that we have had today: the government's attacks on workers' rights across the board and the multiple attacks on workplace safety. We need to be taking action to reduce the road toll, but the ideological smear campaign that has followed the tribunal's order and has occurred with this legislation proposing to abolish the tribunal is putting the safety of everybody on the road at risk. The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal and the orders under the tribunal have lifted and would have continued to lift the wages and conditions of all truck drivers, so that owner-drivers receive a similar pay rate and conditions as employee drivers, whose pay and conditions are covered by an award.

By ensuring minimum safe rates for everybody, it means there is not cutting corners—you cannot try and find somebody who is going to do the job a little bit cheaper by cutting the corners and breaking the rules. Having these minimum rates obliges those at the top of the supply chain to adjust their present and future contracts to actually recognise that there needs to be enough money flowing down the chain to be paying owner-drivers adequately. Otherwise, by abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, the real winners are not the owner-drivers. It is the owner-drivers who will have to continue to underpay themselves, and they are going to find themselves having to cut corners again and again.

No, by abolishing the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, the real winners are going to be those at the top of the supply chain. It is going to be the big businesses and the supermarkets—the people who are ordering and in control of these transport contracts. They are the ones who are going to be screwing all of the truck drivers. They will be screwing the owner-drivers. They will be screwing all the other truck drivers to try to reduce their rates. Whereas, having the tribunal ensured that owner-drivers, as well as other drivers, were able to have safer and stronger working conditions. The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal system was based on the successful system that has been operating in New South Wales for the last 30 years.

The evidence is that having this order from the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, the continuation of the tribunal, is not going to cause owner-drivers to lose work. The outcry from owner-drivers that they are already losing work—where is that work going to go? It is not as though there is a whole spare fleet of thousands of trucks and thousands of truck drivers to take up the jobs they would otherwise be doing. It is not that the employees of the large trucking companies are going to be paid less than these owner-drivers, because they are not. This order and the operation of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal are there to ensure that what owner-drivers are paid is equivalent to what employees of trucking companies are paid.

Safe rates for truck drivers are essential for ensuring that our roads are safer for everyone. When I am driving down the road and when people are sleeping in their beds on truck routes, I and they, the community, want to rest easy that the driver of the truck coming towards us has had enough sleep and is not being forced to do anything that is putting our lives at risk. In particular, I never want to have to receive that dreaded phone call saying that something has happened to my family.

The Greens are very strong in opposing these moves to abolish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal and I am hopeful that the crossbenchers, today, will see sense, see that the rush to push through legislation to abolish it is wrong. It is wrong for the safety of Australians on our roads, it is wrong for truck drivers and it is not in the interests of fair working conditions for ordinary hardworking Australians.