Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008 amends the Interstate Road Transport Charge Act 1985. These amendments permit the making of regulations to apply new registration charges to the five per cent of heavy vehicles registered under the Australian government’s Federal Interstate Registration Scheme, or FIRS. These new charges were agreed to by the Commonwealth state and territory transport ministers at the Australian Transport Council meeting on 29 February 2008. The states and territories have already implemented the charge schedule on heavy vehicles under their registration systems. Consequently 95 per cent of Australia’s heavy vehicle fleet are already operating under the revised registration schedule.

The Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008 also updates some definitions contained in the Interstate Road Transport Act 1985 and establishes a disallowable charge-setting mechanism based on regulation that will stipulate the table of charges or an annual adjustment process. The FIRS provides an alternative to state based registration for heavy vehicles weighing more than 4.5 tonnes and is designed to provide uniform charges and operating conditions for heavy vehicles that carry interstate goods exclusively. Currently slightly more than 21,000 heavy vehicles in Australia are registered under the FIRS. In the case of the ACT, trucks locally registered are subject to the Road Transport Charges (Australian Capital Territory) Act 1993. This act applies charges that are calculated on the same basis as trucks registered under the FIRS.

In the ACT there are 2,549 trucks locally registered, of which 91 per cent are rigid. This means the vast majority of ACT-registered truck owners will see their registration fees go down if the ACT is able to apply the new charges agreed to by the Australian Transport Council. Moreover, in spite of the limited application of the FIRS to Australia’s heavy vehicle fleet, the coalition recognises that not only does it promote regulatory consistency for vehicles solely involved in interstate operations but also it is a scheme that provides some competition and discipline in the heavy vehicle industry.

When an earlier bill on this issue was presented to this place, I raised a range of concerns. Earlier this year members may recall we debated the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill that sought to implement these registration charges. The previous bill contained some provisions which were unacceptable to the opposition parties, and the bill was defeated in the Senate. One provision was the requirement that the Commonwealth must apply the schedule of charges for registration of heavy vehicles as agreed to by the Australian Transport Council. This provision in the previous legislation meant the Commonwealth lost its discretion to determine its own charges upon federally registered trucks and hence the freedom to impose competitive pressure and discipline on state heavy vehicle fees. The opposition believes that competitive pressure is essential to encourage efficiencies and a rational state based charge-setting regime. In addition, the existence of an alternative registration scheme can be used to place pressure on the states to deliver commitments to uniform transport regulations or in other areas. The opposition acknowledges that the government has recognised this flaw in the previous legislation and has removed it from the bill.

The previous legislation also included an annual adjustment component. This annual adjustment mechanism was to be based on a road expenditure formula. The problem with this proposal was that the formula is a particularly expensive one for the trucking industry to wear. It is common knowledge that costs associated with road construction and maintenance, such as steel, concrete and asphalt, are skyrocketing. In other words, the automatic adjustment component locked in an annual increase likely to be well above the CPI. An arbitrary formula of this nature was not acceptable to the opposition.

The opposition recognises the pressure under which the heavy vehicle sector is operating. Since the election of the Rudd government, the daily life of the average Australian has got tougher, with rising fuel and other costs and now an economic downturn. These stresses are falling particularly hard on those who daily haul the essentials of life to supermarkets and keep our industry moving. There are many very small operators in the trucking industry. Many one-man businesses, many families are heavily mortgaged to maintain their transport businesses. They can ill afford increased costs, in particular locked-in increased costs year by year.

The opposition is pleased that the government has also responded to this concern. We note that in the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008 subsection 5(3), the charge adjustment process will be determined by a separate disallowable instrument. The offending section, which provided charges to be determined by an automatic adjustment process, has not been included in this bill. The opposition will always be uncomfortable with an indexing process that removes from parliamentary scrutiny annual tax increases.

The opposition would like to point out that the revised registration charge that is now being levied across almost all of Australia’s heavy vehicle fleet will ultimately generate an extra $88 million per annum to the coffers of the states and territories. The opposition expects that the states and territories will use this extra money appropriately. That is, they will spend the money on their roads. It is essential that Australia’s truckies see a return on this charge. We expect the Rudd government to use its self-proclaimed good offices with its state colleagues to ensure that this occurs.

The coalition serves notice that it will not support any future increases in registration fees unless there is clear evidence that the states are spending this extra money on roads and services for the trucking industry. It is quite clear that over the years the states have been reluctant to expend additional funds on key facilities for the trucking industry. That must stop. If the states expect the Commonwealth to agree to increased registration fees then they must deliver something for the money they are receiving.

With this qualifier, the opposition acknowledges that the government has responded to many of our concerns regarding this legislation. The opposition will of course carefully scrutinise any new charge-setting regulations and we will oppose them should they contain an automatic indexation provision. On these understandings, we will not oppose this bill.

I turn now to the Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill 2008. This bill does two things. It repeals the Road Transport Charges (Australian Capital Territory) Act 1993 so that the ACT may set its own heavy vehicle charges. The opposition believes that the ACT should be free to make such decisions and we support this element of the legislation. As I mentioned in my earlier remarks, this change will actually result in lower registration fees for most trucks in the ACT.

The second part of the bill relates to a different issue and amends the Fuel Tax Act 2006 to implement a road user charge rate of 21c a litre from 1 January 2009. The road user charge is levied on the basis that the costs arising from the industry’s use of the road system should be recovered. Both the trucking industry and the opposition accept this principle. What is important is that the amount is seen to be fair and that it is spent on roads.

Motorists and the trucking industry currently pay 38.143c a litre in tax for every litre of fuel they purchase. However, the trucking industry may claim a partial rebate under the Fuel Tax Act 2006. This act sets a road user charge for the heavy vehicle sector which is intended to recover the cost attributable to the industry’s use of the road system. Trucking operators receive a rebate through the tax system of the difference between the fuel tax they pay at the pump and the road user charge. The road user charge is currently 19.633c per litre. The rebate is therefore 18.510c per litre. Should the road user charge be set at 21c per litre, the rebate would be 17.143c per litre. That increase would be the result of a decision by the Australian transport ministers on 29 February 2008 to support the National Transport Commission’s fourth heavy vehicle charges determination, a set of charges levied upon the heavy vehicle industry based on the principle of cost recovery.

The government has also attempted to implement this tax increase before. Members may recall in March of this year, when introducing the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill 2008, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government flagged the intention of the government to implement the new heavy vehicle determination and increase the road user charge from 1 January 2009. He also stated that the road user charge was to be indexed annually to the same road construction formula that was to apply to the registration charges.

The coalition is concerned that this is an attempt by the Rudd government to reintroduce the indexation of fuel excise. I am sure many remember that the Keating government introduced the indexation of fuel excise and that that index was abolished by the coalition government in 2001. Our position on this matter has not changed. We remain opposed to fuel excise indexation. That is why, with regard to the road user charge, the opposition in the other place disallowed relevant regulation made under the Fuel Tax Act 2006 on 14 May this year which would have effectively introduced fuel excise indexation principles to the road transport sector.

In this bill the government has removed the link to indexation. The Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill would repeal section 43-10(5) of the Fuel Tax Act 2006 and add a new subsection which would set the road user charge at 21c per litre and enable the government to make regulations at another time that may prescribe a method for indexing the road user charge. This of course is a disallowable instrument. The opposition acknowledge that the government has made this change. We believe it to be a constructive improvement. The industry, however, remains concerned about the manner in which the National Transport Commission develops the road user charge. Its consultative processes appear flawed and it refused to disclose to the trucking industry much of the data and the modelling it used to develop the charge. I will come back to this point a little later.

The opposition is also concerned that the government has linked these bills to the implementation of its announced $70 million four-year Heavy Vehicle Safety and Productivity Package. The opposition calls on the government to stop this tactic of blackmail. Threatening to block the $70 million package—inadequate as it is—should these bills not be passed is grubby politics and harms the safety of those who work on our roads. It suggests that the government is more interested in collecting taxes than it is in industry productivity and safety. Governments collect huge revenue from taxes on motorists and the transport industry. More of that money should be allocated for roads. New tax increases are not required—there is more than enough money already collected from the trucking industry to be able to fund this $70 million package and, indeed, to do more. We all recognise that it is important to do more to improve the road infrastructure network, to ensure the safety of truck operators and other motorists on the roads but also to ensure that these vital networks to drive a strong Australian economy are efficient and reliable.

Secondly, there are no performance benchmarks in this package. There is nothing, for example, that stipulates how many roadside facilities will be built, or where. How can truck operators be sure they will actually get the benefits being traded for these cost increases? Likewise, the government has not linked the new charges to obligations on the states to deliver on their promises to harmonise transport regulations. What is the government doing about the appalling failure of the states to eliminate cross-border rule changes which so impede the development of an efficient and cost-effective national road transport system? Labor said when elected to office, delivering wall-to-wall Labor governments around Australia, that it would fix interstate inconsistencies and state differences. In transport reform, the Rudd government has failed dismally, and it is now allowing another opportunity to deliver on reform to pass.

To my mind, the key weakness of these bills is that they do not address the fundamental problems of regulatory reform. They do not take the opportunity to improve efficiency and to put pressure on the states to deliver on their oft-repeated promises to deliver consistency in road transport regulations. This problem, as I have discussed before and will again, is that the states have failed to implement nationally consistent transport regulations. There are many examples, but a pressing and urgent one is the heavy vehicle driver fatigue reforms which were agreed to by the Australian Transport Council in February 2007. These laws are designed to provide a national standard for managing heavy vehicle driver fatigue. They are based on a national template approved by the Australian Transport Council last year. The states agreed to these measures, but now they are failing to deliver them. The trucking industry, which reluctantly accepted the new laws, is not getting the uniformity or the new infrastructure it was promised. But that has not stopped the states, or many of the states, from proceeding with implementing the laws. The states and territories have responsibility for the regulation of heavy vehicles in their jurisdictions. They have to pass the required heavy vehicle fatigue management laws and implement them—and that is where the problems begin.

Let us look at some of the bizarre anomalies. Firstly, despite the promises, the laws are not being implemented nationally. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia commenced implementation of the new laws on 29 September. Tasmania and the Northern Territory plan to implement them later. The Australian Capital Territory and Western Australia are not implementing them at all. Secondly, there are differences in the transitional arrangements. For Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, drivers who operated under the previous basic regulated hours of 12 hours driving plus two hours extra work have six months from 29 September to move to the new standard of 12 hours work in total. But not so in Victoria. In that state there are no transitional arrangements for drivers on standard hours. As of 29 September, drivers in Victoria on standard hours are only able to work 12 hours a day. What is more, this arrangement will apply to interstate drivers coming in from New South Wales and South Australia. So if they drive from Victoria into South Australia they get an extra two hours, but not if they go from South Australia into Victoria. This is an example of the utter ridiculousness of these regulations.

Another example is the different treatments of short rest breaks. Under section 47 of the model law, a driver working standard hours must take a short break after 5¼ hours of work. A driver may make a defence against a breach of this provision if there was no suitable place to be found for a rest and the driver found a rest stop within 45 minutes. In New South Wales or Victoria this is not a defence. This is in spite of the fact that a recent audit of 12,700 kilometres of Australia’s major highways found that the states and territories have largely failed to meet the National Transport Commission guidelines regarding the provision of rest stops. As I have said before in this place, surely New South Wales and Victoria can be more flexible, especially since they have not provided adequate rest stops. How can a government reasonably pass laws requiring trucks to stop at rest areas that do not exist?

Another baffling difference is the treatment of employers should their drivers be breached under the heavy vehicle fatigue management laws. In New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, if an employer can satisfy a court that they have taken reasonable steps to ensure that their drivers do not break the laws, they have a defence. This means a court will not necessarily attribute liability to the employer in the case of a breach by one of their employees. In Victoria, no such defence is available to the employer.

Let us look at the work diary. Under section 56, a truck driver engaged in standard hours only has to carry a work diary if he or she drives more than 100 kilometres from their home base or has done so in the last 28 days. So remembering that heavy vehicle driver fatigue laws apply to trucks with a gross vehicle mass of over 12 tonnes, the driver of a large removal truck working a regular day delivering furniture around a regional centre should not have to worry about filling out a work diary. In Victoria and South Australia, drivers on standard hours who work within 100 kilometres of their base do not have to fill out a work diary. This is consistent with the national model legislation. In Queensland the distance is 200 kilometres before a driver must fill in a work diary. In New South Wales, the state government has insisted that all heavy drivers fill out a work diary even for local work. However, New South Wales has now issued a last-minute exemption so that drivers undertaking work within 100 kilometres do not need a diary. Those who are primary producers must fill out a diary only if they work more than 160 kilometres from their base. So in New South Wales we have the extraordinary fact that there are inconsistencies within the state between drivers performing the same task, let alone between states.

I previously mentioned other baffling inconsistencies in the treatment by the states of national road freight. For example, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland have designated road train routes and make it possible for trucks to pull highly efficient B-triples across the state. B-triples are highly efficient vehicle combinations, up to 30 per cent more productive than B-doubles. They also help to get trucks off our roads since two B-triples is equivalent to five semitrailers. Unfortunately, New South Wales refuses to open up its road system to those vehicles in spite of a COAG decision in 2006 that the states and territories would establish a B-triple network. New South Wales simply refuses to recognise B-triples as a legitimate vehicle combination able to operate on road train routes. Victoria only allows strictly limited B-triple use between Broadmeadows and Geelong, and then only for the trucks moving car components for the Ford motor company. These odd policy decisions by New South Wales and Victoria mean that B-triple freight movements cannot take place on a national basis. This is despite the fact that the road freight task is expected to nearly double by 2020.

There are other anomalies too. One is the glacial rate of take-up by some states of common higher mass limits for trucks with road friendly suspension. As far back as 1999 the states and territories agreed with the Commonwealth that Australia should develop approved routes for trucks with road friendly suspension. This is an important reform, promising to generate freight efficiencies worth hundreds of millions of dollars and place Australia in the forefront of the world in pioneering and applying new developments in pavement friendly technologies. According to the reform, an approved road network for trucks fitted with state-of-the-art suspension systems would roll out as specific roads and bridges were protected. Now, after nearly 10 years, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory and increasing areas of Queensland have developed an extensive approved road network for these types of trucks. But where is New South Wales? New South Wales has been blocking this initiative ever since it started, imposing unique and difficult regulations that effectively make it impossible for vehicles to qualify. New South Wales continues to refuse to publish its high mass limit network and open up in a transparent way its approval processes to drive on it.

Another inefficient agony in our so-called national road freight system is the different treatment of widths of loads. For example, states cannot agree to a harmonised approach to minor overwidth roads, such as occurs with hay bales. Drought and even average seasonal variations in Australia generate large amounts of hay movement across state borders. However, in New South Wales rigid semitrailers and B-doubles may be loaded to a width of 2.83 metres only, but next door in Victoria these trucks can be loaded to three metres. Beware the farmer in Victoria who dares to load his truck with hay as wide as legally possible who then drives into New South Wales.

I conclude with the bizarre treatment of indivisible and divisible loads. If you are a truckie carrying an indivisible load—that is, a load that cannot be physically broken down, like a piece of binding machinery—states will allow you oversized access with conditions. If you are unfortunate enough to carry a divisible load, such as plasterboard, you must stack it to a narrow width of 2.5 metres only. This forces the load to be stacked higher, decreasing roll stability. A rational mind would tell you that if divisible loads were allowed some flexibility, a safer and more efficient truck would be on the road.

I continue to call upon the Rudd Labor government to deal with these frustrating and expensive anomalies in Australia’s transport sector. I state the obvious: Australia is a nation and is a national economy. It is time that the regulatory environment for Australia recognised this fact. The government needs to take this matter seriously and deliver on its rhetoric that it will be able to work effectively with the states to deliver nationally consistent laws. Is it any wonder that the truck industry is angry about increased charges being imposed upon it when it is not getting its share of the bargain delivered? The trucking industry is prepared to pay its own way, but it expects to get a fair deal and that has not been happening.

The opposition has proposed a series of amendments to the Road Charges Legislation Repeal and Amendment Bill 2008. These amendments will address a number of concerns we have regarding the government’s approach to the charge-setting regime on the heavy vehicle industry. The first is to ensure that indexation of charges is not re-introduced by stealth. The second is the management of such charges in the future and the implementation of arrangements which will guarantee the transparency of the road-user-charge price-setting mechanism. The third is the issue of heavy vehicle rest areas and the need to put in place a performance guarantee that ensures at least 50 new rest areas are built every year on the national road network. The fourth responds to the matter I have just discussed—the absurd and contradictory state based transport regulations, which must be reformed. Our support for this bill will be conditional on the acceptance of these amendments.

Debate adjourned.