Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry. Senator Marshall has walked in. Senator Marshall, I was going to say that I know how hard you worked. I did not see you come in. I apologise for that. To channel it down, I experience most of my angst on this in my home state—that wonderful state where the economy is booming: Western Australia. I happen to know the people who were engaged in the negotiation of the legislation in WA—a fine bunch of men and women.

What happened in Western Australia is that about three years ago there was a massive stoppage by owner-drivers because they had come to the end of their tether. I am talking about owner-drivers who were engaged in long-distance, metropolitan and short-distance work around Perth and in Western Australia, ranging from small two-, three- or four-tonne vehicles up to road-train and triple road-train operators with 90-tonne payloads running between the ports in the northern half of Western Australia and into the Northern Territory. The price of fuel, amongst other things, was absolutely killing them. They were at the stage where they were wondering whether they would continue in the industry. If they left the industry, they were wondering what the heck they would do with the $300,000 bucket of nuts and bolts they had parked out on the driveway one day a fortnight and how the heck they would make the payments for it. Unfortunately, they found themselves on a collision course with the banks, and the family home was on the line. They had nowhere to go but to keep working, until, one day, they said, ‘Enough is enough.’ To get those truckies, with those sorts of debts hanging over their heads, to actually say that they were not going to put the key in the ignition and they were not going to start that engine because they could no longer afford to work was really something. Marriage breakdowns were occurring along the way too.

They convened a meeting on a Sunday, and I know for a fact that about 400 owner-drivers at the meeting said, ‘We are going to stop the state unless we get legislation similar to that in New South Wales and Victoria that protects us from unscrupulous employers who are screwing the living daylights out of us.’ As it turns out, the majority of the people screwing the living daylights out the trucking industry are the wonderful multinational companies that happen to have a large presence around the state of Western Australia, particularly in mining, along the coast and in the fuel, gas and oil sectors. These are the companies that, at the end of the day, threaten the trucking industry and say that owner-drivers must dance to their tune regardless of the costs, because they are not interested.

With the great work of the Transport Workers Union of Western Australia, who represent 2,000 owner-drivers, and the Transport Forum of Western Australia, which is the peak transport employer body in Western Australia that represents some 700 transport companies, and with the assistance of the Gallop Labor government, they developed some legislation that would protect these owner-drivers from unscrupulous employers, give them an avenue for dispute settlement, provide them with a safe, sustainable minimum rates charter and allow them to recoup the costs they incur in running their vehicles. As you would appreciate, when we started whingeing about the $1.30 or $1.40 a litre that we had to pay here 12 months ago, imagine what the truckies are paying up in Halls Creek or Kununurra, where they are putting 1,800 litres of fuel in their vehicles—and their returns are one kilometre per litre—and you can understand the pain that they were going through. And some of them have to wait 90 days to get paid.

All this negotiation was done and it was done in good faith. People did not have guns held to their heads to make them negotiate a safe, sustainable rate and a code of conduct that would look after these subcontractors. It was done in consultation with both sides of industry and with the assistance of the Western Australian Labor government. And for that, we have a bill, which I am led to believe is in the upper house in Western Australia as we speak, called the Road Freight Transport Industry (Contracts and Disputes) Bill.

The worst thing, though, will be if this obnoxious piece of legislation before the Senate tonight gets through this chamber. I am really hoping the moon and the stars will align tonight and the Western Australian senators might think, ‘Oh my gosh, what are we doing to those subcontractors in Western Australia?’ and that they will have the gall to stand up and say, ‘This legislation is wrong; we are heading for a major catastrophe in Western Australia if our laws are overridden by this piece of legislation tonight.’ Not only that but if the industry does not have the ability to say, ‘We need to pay safe, sustainable rates to these owner-drivers; we need to protect them from unscrupulous employers and major users of transport,’ the conditions on our roads will deteriorate in terms of safety for other road users—let alone the fact that the Western Australian transport industry is losing subcontractors in droves. They cannot afford to run these operations, so why would they enter this industry to get done over by this piece of legislation? (Time expired)