Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My contribution will not come as a shock to you or me, but I want to bring this to the attention of the chamber. I'm going to quote from a Channel Nine news article. A truck driver by the name of Samandeep Singh was driving a truck in Melbourne. He knew his brakes were faulty but he drove on anyway before hitting and killing a Victorian police officer. I want to pay the greatest respects firstly to First Constable D'Arne De Leo, her family and loved ones. In no way do I intend to single out Mr Singh, but he was in charge of the truck at the time. He smashed into 45-year-old First Constable D'Arne De Leo's motorbike in suburban Melbourne as she was riding to work in January 2017.

This is the worst part. The worst part is that the report said—and I've watched the video on the internet too—that the truck wasn't roadworthy. Singh knew the rear brakes were not working and the front brakes were compromised because the vehicle was loaded incorrectly. The TV report on Channel Nine clearly said that the driver had no experience. He was a young 30-year-old man. I don't know what pain that poor fellow is going through now. Obviously, he's in a very, very difficult position. He's in jail. He's been in jail for four years. We have not only the life of a constable on her way to work being snatched but this young man's life—I don't know how he can put it back together. He has covered himself in tattoos to honour the police first constable that he, unfortunately, killed—tattoos with her police number and the date of the accident. I mean, my God, the pain that must be going through a number of families because of this accident that should never have happened.

What pains me even more, Mr Acting Deputy President Gallacher, is that you and I did a lot of work, through the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport and the road safety inquiry. A lot of the work on the road safety inquiry was channelled towards the poor condition of a lot of vehicles—heavy vehicles and trucks—on the road. Not only that, but we uncovered corruption in training—we'll call it training—where unscrupulous ratbags had lied, cheated, stolen and done whatever they could to take money and fork out very poor training and then have a connection where they could get these drivers their licences, and you know where it went from there. Three years later, Mr Acting Deputy President, as the chair of the RRAT committee, I'm still waiting for the government to come back and respond to the report that we wrote, that you and I and other senators put the work into.

Let's go back to Mr Singh as he was coming down the road. He said: 'I started trying to brake from about a kilometre away.' I am an ex-truck driver. This was a 12-tonne truck—I never drove 12 tonnes; I drove road trains —and a kilometre away and the truck wasn't slowing down fast enough. He told a witness after the 12 January crash at Wantirna intersection. The 14-tonne Isuzu truck—sorry, I said 12; it was a 14-tonne rigid truck—was owned by Ermes Transport, and they had a record of shoddy maintenance by an unqualified mechanic. I can't believe that in 2020 I'm reading this, even though the accident happened back then. No, I can believe it, because there are no rules in this nation to go after the root cause.

The poor truck driver, when all this is said and done—I say that because of the pain he must be going through. But the family of the victim don't wish any ill towards Mr Singh, and that's a very big call. But can you believe the trucking company was not investigated. I've googled 'Ermes Transport'. I've spoken to people in Victoria. I said, 'Who the hell is Ermes Transport?' But it is typical of this nation that, when you go on the ASIC register, you can't find out who the company is. I can't find out who it is. You can't google it. There's no website for Ermes Transport. The truck was loaded. Whose freight were they carting? Were they subcontracting to another transport company? I'm not blaming that other transport company. It's just that I've got to highlight this. Were they carting directly for a client?

We lose 1,200 lives a year in road accidents and we manage to injure and maim another 30,000. A young man's life has been completely ruined. I don't know if he was forced to do it; I've got no idea. It pretty much sounds like it. But the owner of the truck has walked away scot-free. How many other trucks does this company own? How many other employees have been forced to drive trucks where they knew work had been done by 'shoddy mechanics'—they're not my words; that's the quote in the report. How many other drivers were told, 'Just get in the truck and go.' I can't believe that this trucking company, for all I know, could still be out there. They're still registered. That doesn't mean a thing.

I'm sending the message out to all Australian trucking companies about Ermes Transport—whoever that is. There are sickos in this nation who get rewarded by changing their company name. I'm going to save that, because I've got a list of them and they're all going to get named in this Senate before I leave. They must be put on a do-not-use register. There is no way known that any decent man or woman in this nation would want to engage Ermes Transport, and yet the sadness is that the police could not investigate that company.

Acting Deputy President Senator Gallacher, you and I can get wound up pretty good and pretty quickly on the chain of responsibility. I am sick of that crap. The chain of responsibility—how long have we been talking about this? Thirty years? The chain of responsibility was going to be the thing that fixes everything, but what has it done? I think there have been four prosecutions. But Ermes Transport could still be running around. The man who owns Ermes Transport or the manager who directed the driver to go out there and drive the unworthy truck could be out there. The driver had a licence but hadn't been trained. He wasn't qualified. Where did the licence come from? How did that man get his licence? Who did this supposed training? Who passed him? How does this happen? Also, to the owner of Ermes Transport, how can you sleep at night? I don't even know who you are or how many of you there are, but there is a man in there doing four years of jail and a family has lost a loved one, and yet the police could not prosecute. This is just absolutely too incredible.

What I'm trying to get back to and what I, alongside Senator Gallacher, raise every time in this chamber and in Senate inquiries all around this nation, is the issue of road safety. We raise it all the time and say that it should absolutely be front of mind of all of us in this chamber and the other place over there. Deaths at work in trucks on the road should not be the price of doing business. Where is it in our psyche that it is wrong to crunch down on those who are doing the wrong thing when it comes to heavy vehicles or any vehicles on the road? Who in this chamber or that chamber thinks that it would not be right to go all the way down that rabbit hole and find out who the hell Ermes Transport are, where they are now, who they were carting for, if they're still carting, and where the other employees are, if there are others—I don't think for one minute there was only one truck. Who would support that? No-one. Senator Gallacher and I raise all these road safety issues around an industry that, with the greatest of respect, Senator Gallacher and I have forgotten more about heavy vehicles and road transport than anyone else, and that's not being rude—that was our background. That's where we came from. We raise the issues of how qualified our truck drivers are—I'm not even talking about wage theft or anything else yet—and how safe those vehicles are on the road. The majority of the road transport industry—not all of them—are very decent, hardworking men and women, but unfortunately we have a minority like the grubs at Ermes Transport—and I'm coming back to name more. They allow lives to be destroyed or taken away and they walk off scot-free. I can't think how annoyed the Victoria Police would be about this. And there's another incident going on where other police were killed too.

I want to send the message, but I don't know how many more times I have to say this, because I cannot get it through the Deputy Prime Minister's head. He has loved having a photo taken with a hi-vis jacket and a Kenworth with some bling on it while saying 'We love our truckies' during this pandemic, but when is the Deputy Prime Minister going to answer or respond to that hard done report that Senator Gallacher and I wrote three years ago?