Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. I think that the Labor Party today should be wise and honourable enough to say that this has not worked out in the way that I suspect they thought it would work out at the start. It would be disgraceful to think that they would stand by a decision today which is obviously hurting people. Why would they do that? The decision was originally made by the Labor Party and the Greens and, especially, the Independent, Mr Windsor—he backed it as well. Mr Oakeshott, I have to give him his due, did not vote for this; Mr Windsor did.

But it is not just about the owner-drivers—not just the mum-and-dad operators—it is also about the tyre fitters. I would see them, as an accountant, and there is a whole heap of money that goes to tyre fitters. They try to keep the owner-drivers on the road. There are the mechanics, there is the fuel bill, there are truck sales—this is basically all the sections of small economies. You can go to a little town—a little town like Wobbegar—and that is one thing that you will find there: you will find an owner-operator with his rigs. He is also a source of employment for a lot of people around the area.

If you try to pick up a load from some of the remote areas—from the back of Eulo, or the back of Barragan, or into the hills behind Weabonga or up into Emmaville—then guess who is going to pick up the load? Guess who is going to go to pick up your cattle? It will be an owner-operator. An owner-operator is the one who will turn up there with their truck to get your produce to a sale, to keep that family on the land going, to keep that truck operator going and to keep the people who supply that truck operator going—to keep our economy going.

Before they even start, these owner-operators have substantial bills to pay. The lease payments on average would be around $6,000 for a decent rig, and if you are going for one of the new ones, like the Kenworth T909, it is probably more than that. So you would have about $6,000 or $7,000 in payments before you even pass go. Of course, you have to pay your registration. That is about $30,000 a year, so there is another 2½ thousand dollars a month that you need for that. Then before you can even pass go you have to pay your insurance—there is about $12,000 there, so that is another $1,000 a month. With the bits and pieces you are not shy of $10,000 before you even start—before you even pick up a load.

What this legislation has done means that they cannot pick up a load. I will tell you why, Mr Deputy Speaker. Basically, in very rough form, your back loads have to be at roughly the equivalent charge of your forward loads. So if I picked up a load at Tamworth and ran it down to Thomas Foods International in Adelaide—let's say it is 60 steers or something—it would be maybe $5,000 or $6,000. That is the price for going down.

Now, if I live in Tamworth but my rig is in Adelaide and I have to get it home. I cannot live there—there is only so long that you want to live in your cabin for. I have to turn around and get it home. It does not matter what happens; it is not 'safe' to say, 'Well, you can't pick up anything on the way back.' But I could say, 'Oh, I could pick up a couple of bulls and run them back up then at least they will pay for a bit of my fuel. I will be able to help myself out a bit and pay for some of my costs to get back to Tamworth.' But I cannot do it under this legislation! I can do it, but the rate that I charge means that there is no way on earth the person will pay for what I have to charge them to run that smaller load—maybe it is a couple of pallets of beer or something that I pick up to run back. The rate that I have to charge puts me out of the market.

So what do I do? I still have to get my rig home. I get the rig home, but I do not get any money for it. Obviously, on both instances, I am driving myself out of business. This is absurd, because the problem is that other people can do it. The bigger operators can do it—to be quite frank, the operators where the Transport Workers Union are the members driving the rigs. They get to do it. This is just completely and utterly at odds with what our nation is supposed to be about. Let's compete on fair terms.

If you want to talk about fairness, let's have these people competing on fair terms—not driving the mum-and-dad owner-operators out. They are doing what we believe a person should be able to do in an economy: start and, by the sweat of their own brow, go through the economic and social stratification of life to find themselves in the best possible position and the highest level of freedom. They can be masters of their own ship—that is, masters of their own rig. They can basically wear their own uniform, pay for their house and have the greatest control over their own future. They work hard, and they are happy to do it.

But today they are not working. They are down here, and they should not have to be down here. They should not have to spend their time, their money and their efforts. Some of them came down today from Rockhampton because they know that this has to be changed and that they have to keep the pressure on people to change it.

The other thing I can assure us of is that when people start running out of money that the safety issues we want them to control are not going to be controlled. They need to change their tyres to deal with the wear and tear, they go through a king pin or they go through all the issues—like the brake lines. These issues are assisted by keeping people viable financially by allowing them to pick up loads. It is not by keeping them in a corner and restricting them from getting access.

I think about some of these people—the Welshes of Kootingal, or the Cruikshanks, or the Harrisons who I knew up at St George, or Stockmaster at Tamworth, or Laurie's Haulage at Manilla or the person who used to pick up a lot of our cattle—Bullier Johnstone out at Surat—these are the people who are so fundamentally a part of our towns and, fundamentally, we have to make sure that we look after them.

What will also be interesting today is that we will deal with this issue as quickly as possible. I know it looks like the Labor Party are standing by this piece of legislation—why, I do not know. But it will be interesting to see where the Greens are. I was up at Tamworth the other day and there was a unanimous resolution from the floor. We had Mercurius Goldstein from the Greens. We also had Rob Taber there as an Independent. It was a unanimous resolution in support of getting rid of this. It will be interesting to see whether the Greens resolution in Tamworth is the same as their resolution down here.

Every time I see an owner-driver, I see the pride that people have in their rig—how clean they keep it. I have known people who would not let you into their truck with your shoes on. You had to take them off, put your shoes beside it and go in your socks. It was pride they had in it. You have a look at them; they are clean. They are a reflection of their lives. It is their home on the road, and they treat it as their home. What is happening in this parliament—and, as I said, we never voted for it; Darren did not vote for it and I did not vote for it—is that we have to make sure that that pride that is reflected in their lives and their works is also reflected in the way we support them today in our vote.

I hear and do not like the insinuation when they continue to bring up the issue of accidents. Let me remind you that 84 per cent of accidents between a car and a truck—and we wish there were none—are the car's fault, not the truck's fault. These people are the professional drivers. They spend their whole lives on the road. With owner-drivers it is lower still because it is their rig, it is their insurance bill and it is their load that they are dealing with.

Let's not start pointing the finger. We note that human error means there will always be accidents of some sort, but we are trying to deal with them with better roads and monitoring logbooks. These issues, not sending people broke, deal with safety. This is not an issue about how the scalies operate on the road. This is not an issue about the hours you are supposed to work on the road. This is not an issue about the conditions of the road. This is an argument determining what a person, an individual, a mum-and-dad operator—can pick up so they can stack up their books so they can get their rig home so they can keep themselves financially viable.

It also inevitably brings us back—and I saw it today, when I was listening to the noise of the people driving around, blowing their horns in their trucks as they went around. I had heard that before. It is an indication of the chaos that you get from a Labor-Greens-Independent government. It is an indication of the absolute chaos that we have seen before—the chaos we saw when they closed down the live cattle trade. All of a sudden, the northern cattle producers—they said they were just indulgent rich pastoralists, but it was absolutely devastating to the whole cattle industry. Now we have seen it again in owner-operators, mum-and-dad operators in the truck industry. Once more they have all come down here as a memory for the Australian people. This is another leftover of the chaos that is created by a government that does not understand how business works, that does not understand how people work, that does not look through the ramifications of the decision and that, more importantly, even when those faults are discovered and clearly on display for everybody to see—what is worse than everything else is to hear that, after they have seen all these people turn up, we have the Labor Party coming to the dispatch box and saying they have not changed their minds.

If the Labor Party, the Greens and the Independents win the election, they will bring this back because it is their policy. It is what they believe in. They can say it was a mistake in the first instance, but it is no longer a mistake; it is their policy. Everybody has to remember that. When you go to the ballot box at the forthcoming election, if Labor, the Greens and the Independents win, they will bring back their policy.

I hope we get this thing kicked out. I hope it gets through the Senate; we will see how we go. I commend the work of all those who have come down here. But let's remember: we have a battle today to get it kicked out, but we have a battle in the next month or so to make sure it stays out, and the only way it can stay out is if Labor, the Greens and the Independents stay out of government.

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