Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise today to talk about something I'm very passionate about, which is heavy vehicle rest areas or truck bays. A lot of people in suburban Australia would have no idea what I'm even talking about. These can take all shapes and sizes, but they're normally parking bays on the side of the road. You'll see a blue sign. Some of them may have a bit of bitumen. Some may have a bit of lighting. If you're really lucky, in Western Australia at some of them you might even get a rubbish bin. If you're in the Kimberley, don't hold your breath on it.

Truck bays are such an important part of our national infrastructure. We had many heroes of the pandemic—from shop assistants to nurses and medical staff—but our trucking heroes kept this nation going. If I sat down and told you the way our truckies were treated in the early days of the pandemic you wouldn't believe that this would happen in 2022 in Australia. It got to the stage where they were treated like lepers. Yet truckies deliver the food, the fuel, the building materials and the medicines. Everything you consume, everything you wear, everything you touch and everything you see has been on the back of a truck at some stage—at least once but sometimes twice or three times and sometimes eight or nine or 10 times. Look at the cardigan you might be wearing or the ugg boots you've got on. Imagine how many trips those uggies have taken from when things first started off with food going to the farm and sheep being shorn. Do I have to keep going? Do you understand where I'm going on this? How many trips have those ugg boots taken by the time they've gone through the manufacturing system and through the retail system?

We are indebted to our truck drivers. They are heroes—and not just in the pandemic. Our truckies are true-life Aussie heroes, and they should be absolutely supported at every turn. Sadly, over the years they haven't been, and sadly over the years I've seen a terrible decline in the availability of truck bays and rest areas for our truckies. It's got to the stage where we have bureaucrats and state governments building truck bays in places where they think the truck drivers get tired and where they think the truck drivers might pull over.

We've even had the absurdity of going back to the days when I was on the road, that if you were delivering in Melbourne or delivering in Sydney and you got in there late at night then you parked somewhere in the industrial area where you were going to unload. Now our truckies can't even do that because the gestapo in the councils now kick them off. They wake them up, banging on their doors. They'll have eyes that feel like they've been stabbed by hot prongs, and these people are banging on their doors and telling them to move, 'Get out of here!' They want the freight—they can't wait to get the freight—but they're treating our truckies terribly.

But I have to tell you that there's a good side to this—there's a really happy side. During the election, I know that I committed, along with, at the time, shadow minister King, $80 million to build new truck bays. I'm very happy to say in this place that the Australian government is providing $65 million per year in two tranches through the Heavy Vehicle Safety and Productivity Program. This provides funding for infrastructure projects that improve productivity and safety outcomes for heavy-vehicle operations across Australia, including rest areas for truck drivers. More than 90 per cent of projects delivered through this program will be in regional areas. It gets better: I'm very happy to report that the government is also delivering on our election commitment to the $80 million top-up—on top of it—dedicated to funding heavy-vehicle rest areas. This funding is in addition to the $65 million I already announced is to be set aside to fund rest areas, and it supplements the existing HVSPP.

It means that, all up, the Australian government, the Albanese government, is delivering no less—it has committed to and will do it—over $140 million towards rest areas for our truckies: $140 million! And it gets even better: not only did we promise it, and not only are we going to deliver it, but part of the election promise was that our government said it would do something that no other government in this nation has ever done. We're actually going to sit down with the truckies. We're going to sit down with the men and women who have their hands on the steering wheel, day in and day out—those dedicated heroes who deliver everything we rely on, from the farm, to the paddock, to the stores, to the ports and to the shopping centres—six, seven, eight or nine times. The truckies are going to sit with us and the truckies are going to tell us where they get tired, where they need these rest areas and—God help us!—we're even going to start talking about fit for purpose.

I'm so rapt, as an ex-truckie—and I'm still a truckie—and as someone who still does half a dozen triple road trains between Perth, Kununurra and Broome every year. I'm looking forward to this one.