Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by adding my condolences to the families of the four young people killed in the south-east recently. When former Prime Minister Abbott was elected in 2013, he wanted to be known as the infrastructure Prime Minister of Australia. He thought that, if he said it often enough and if his government members said it often enough, he would be so. But the reality is that it was all spin and the facts show otherwise. If the Prime Minister wanted to be the infrastructure Prime Minister of Australia then he needed to actually spend money on building infrastructure, and the reality is that he did not.

The spend that occurs and has occurred since this government came to office has been nothing more than normal annual expenditure that governments of all persuasions do each and every year. It is what taxpayers expect governments to do with the taxes that they pay. But the reality is that we are not even getting the amount of infrastructure spend that we might have got in the past. Much of it is just deferred or delayed and, whilst the government keeps talking about it, the reality is that it is saving the money by not spending it.

Even worse than that, when this government came to office, one of the first things it did was to freeze the financial assistance grants to local governments. That meant that it was cutting $1 billion from the councils around Australia. Councils build and maintain local roads. It is a core responsibility for them, and indeed they are one of the levels of government that actually do a lot of good local work in repairing and maintaining our local roads. When the government finally decided that it would give some money back to councils, it did so because of Labor's insistence that its support for the fuel excise indexation was contingent on the money raised going back to local government. So it was, indeed, Labor who ensured that that additional money went to local councils.

But I say to the member for Boothby that we did not get back the $18 million of supplementary local road funding in South Australia that the Local Government Association of South Australia has for years been campaigning for and which in previous years was given to South Australia as a supplementary fund. When this government came to office, it was cut. We did not get it. It seems to me that, as a state that has 11 per cent of the roads, seven per cent of the population and only five per cent of the road funding, we could do a lot better. Perhaps the member for Boothby would like to stand up within her party room and see what she can do about ensuring that that is the case. It is time that funding for roads in South Australia was fairly and permanently fixed up.

Road safety is affected by many factors. Bad roads in terms of both design and maintenance, poor driving, poor vehicle maintenance and driver fatigue all contribute to road accidents. When the Transport Workers Union of Australia raise these legitimate concerns, government members ridicule them and dismiss the concerns that they raise. Safe Work Australia confirms that truck driving is Australia's deadliest job. Five hundred and eighty-three drivers were killed between 2003 and 2015. Yes, most of them are males, because, if we look at who most of the transport drivers of this nation are, most of them are males. In the 10 years to 2014, over 2,500 Australians have died in truck crashes, so it is not just the drivers who become our road fatalities. In fact, my understanding is that since October of this year, in less than two months, we have had 26 people die on our roads through truck crashes.

Transport companies and owner-drivers widely place unreasonable and unsustainable pressure, by low-cost contracts, on drivers, forcing them to skip maintenance, to speed, to overload vehicles and to drive long hours. They do that in order to make ends meet. Not surprisingly, the industry has very high rates of bankruptcy, suicide and workplace deaths and injury. ASIC data confirms that transport operators have one of the highest rates of insolvency in the country. And then we have the case of exploited migrant workers who are given shonky licences from dodgy training schools, without proper training, or are being paid low rates and are working extra hours without even being paid.

The causes of all these accidents are known to this government and they should stop ignoring them, because road safety affects us all. Finally, can I say that the motion says nothing about the responsibilities of the federal government with respect to road safety.

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