Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a report that was done following a very lengthy—I think it was about three years—inquiry into road safety. I was joined in that committee work by Senator Gallacher. I think Senator Brockman was on the committee at the time. Senator Back was on it. The report was called Aspects of road safety in Australia, and it was done in the previous parliament. I want to thank former senator Barry O'Sullivan and the committee for the hard work that was put in. It was a very bipartisan inquiry.

It started off because we had lost the Australian vehicle-manufacturing industry and we thought it could be a good time to start looking at safety standards in vehicles and all sorts of other things. What came out of it was an interesting report. I had seen on the social media—in 2014, I think it was—that Chris Reason from Channel Seven had tweeted about a Scotts Transport B-double, which is two trailers joined together, a bit shorter than a road train, that was on the M5. It was a two-up team from Brisbane running to Sydney, and the drivers had gone down the M5 and couldn't get into the airport tunnel at Sydney. One driver had refused to get out of the bunk, and the other driver just stood there like a stunned mullet. When he was asked by the reporter, while traffic was banking up behind him at peak hour, whether he shouldn't at least back the B-double up so he could get out of the way and let traffic flow, his response was that he didn't know how to. Anyway, it went on and on and on. So we realised that there was a serious problem within the road transport industry.

The report has finally come back. I will always give credit where credit is due, and I'll go through each of the recommendations when I have the opportunity at a later date, and I will congratulate the government when they have finally done something, if they have done something, but I will be extraordinarily critical if they have not done anything or they have just ignored the report, because road safety should not be political; it should be in the front of the mind of everyone in this building, in this chamber and the other chamber.

There is something I want to just touch on. There was one recommendation that is timely to talk about. I will read the recommendation. I'm not cherrypicking; because of the contribution I made in this chamber last week, it is topical right now. The committee—not Labor but the committee, all of us—recommended that 'Australian Skills Quality Authority conduct an audit of all heavy vehicle driver training facilities (registered training organisations) in Australia', because we found that there was the odd crook, corrupt RTO. And we found that there was a crook, corrupt RTO up there in Coffs Harbour—whose name escapes me at the moment because it was that many years ago—who had employed their own trainer who recruited fellow countrymen from where he came from, to exploit them. He took money from them and then he trained them and then he had a deal with the Queensland government—and the Queensland government were not implicated in this; they were as clean as anything—because they had a mutual recognition agreement, where heavy vehicle licences were handed out like confetti at a wedding. To cut a very long story short, there were about 120 of them, and 80 of them gave their licences back when the Queensland government wanted to send out show-causes as to why they should keep them. There were a handful—I think 20 or 30—who actually kept their licences because they could drive, but the rest had all been given their licence for a small fee to the corrupt, crook RTO.

Anyway, what has come back is that the Australian government has noted this recommendation. They're not going to do anything about it; they've noted it. This is what the government said. I'm talking about skills here—having our heavy vehicle drivers trained properly. The government says it is committed to reducing regulatory burden and red tape. Since when has training heavy vehicle drivers to be safe on our highways—not only so they don't kill themselves but so that they don't kill some other poor devil coming the other way or driving alongside them—been red tape and a regulatory burden?

It really irks me. I have to talk about this recommendation because of the contribution I made in here last week. I have the court transcript of that shocking situation in Melbourne back in 2017. Truck driver Samandeep Singh couldn't stop the overloaded truck. The brakes were faulty. He knew they were faulty. It even says so in the transcript. I'm not making this up. It was shoddy workmanship from an unqualified mechanic. He was working for a crook—a ratbag, rotten-to-the-core trucking company by the name of Ermes Transport, who were contracting to Civic Transport Services, who are all over Australia. Their website says they do everything from cars, couriers and trucks through to B-double operators. They've got them all. He was working for this company, and these crooks were working for Civic Transport Services. This poor truck driver—let alone First Constable De Leo, who was killed on her way to work, sitting on her motorbike, and the torment to both those families. The man has covered himself in tattoos. He's a walking monument to the police officer. He's tattooed himself with her police number. He's tattooed himself with the date that he unfortunately killed her because of the faulty truck, which had no brakes and was loaded incorrectly.

I could go on all day about this. The nation needs to know about this. It says in the court transcript here that the judge said to Mr Singh: 'Very briefly stated, you obtained your heavy rigid vehicle licence in August of 2016 after a one-day course.' I drove road trains from Perth to Darwin for 12 years, but I wouldn't dare to think that I know everything. A one-day course! That was with the crook Ermes Transport. Then he went to Civic Transport Services, which employed the crooks at Ermes Transport, and did a course there. A course on what? What the hell? Who is training? What are their qualifications?

Unfortunately, no-one has prosecuted the crooks at Ermes Transport or gone further up the chain. What I did find out is that there were 11 trucks that this crook Ermes Transport owned. I don't know if they were all working for Civic—they probably were. And that's before I even start on Civic Transport Services. I'm coming back for them as well. Make no mistake about that. The police couldn't prosecute, but there were 11 trucks that all got an improvement notice or some notice to fix the truck because it wasn't working. How many more people have to be killed on our roads?

Our truckies are the salt of the earth. We should be bowing to our truck drivers and thanking them for the job that they do. They are essential workers. They're at the front line. In my heart this has been known for three generations. I know what we do as truck drivers. We go about our business quietly. We don't want flowers thrown at our feet. We don't want people saying, 'Oh, we love our truck drivers.' We just want to be paid properly and respected, and we want to get home to our families safely. But every time something goes wrong on the road, it's the truckies' fault.

I come back to the government: is there nobody on that side of the chamber who will listen when I sit up here and say, 'Stop! No more!'? We can't have deaths on our roads that can be avoided. We can't run protection rackets for the ratbags out there that are doing the wrong thing. What do we say to the victims' families—'Oh, that's just another statistic. It's not a work death. It's just another road statistic. It's part of doing business in this nation'? For the life of me, what do I have to do to get the attention of that side of the chamber? Is there not someone in a minister's office who is listening and thinking, 'For Christ's sake, he actually makes sense'?