Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Aston for the question. It was great to join her on Henderson Road in Knoxfield just last week. It's one of the great projects that's being built through her electorate.

I want to start by saying that I do know how tough it has been for workers in the transport industry over the past few weeks. They drive through the night to get food on our supermarket shelves, medicines to pharmacies and fuel to our petrol stations. It's been particularly challenging to grapple with spikes in demand for fuel delivery across the last few weeks.

In the last couple of weeks, they've also been dealing, of course, with rising fuel costs eating into their bottom line. It's why I was so pleased to join with Minister Rishworth this morning to announce the amendments to the Fair Work Act which will allow for transport operators to apply to renegotiate with their clients more quickly so that they can more fairly share the cost of fuel spikes across the supply chain. Currently, the Fair Work Commission cannot deliver a determination for at least six months. For those opposite, it's going to be a question of whether you will support that legislation when it is introduced next week.

With truck operators having such tight margins, they cannot wait, and it would be good if the opposition signalled their support sooner rather than later. Some of the larger supermarkets are already working with the trucking industry to renegotiate contracts, but this should be happening right the way across the board. Government, industry and unions were all united in their support for this change. This is one of the many actions that the Albanese government is taking to address fuel costs and to support businesses and workers across our important transport sector. We're able to do this because of our close and regular engagement with them.

Throughout this time, I've been meeting regularly with representatives from the road transport, rail, aviation and maritime sector, joined by representatives of the fuel industry. Along with providing me and my department with updates on impacts on the industry, they are also advising me of the work that they're doing to support the safe arrival of Australians from the Middle East. We know already that over 7,700 Australians have arrived home safely from the UAE and Qatar since the beginning of this conflict. I particularly want to give a shout-out and thanks to the pilots and flight crews who have carefully and expertly navigated flights out of the Middle East, when it has been safe to do so. Qantas have also been putting on additional flights to Sydney via Singapore so Australians have more ways to get home and to the world.

Our regular engagements across industries have helped inform the actions that this government is taking. That's what you do. You engage with the industry and you work with your departments when you've got times like these, and you make sure that you're actually being a patriot, not political.

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