How national will we go?
There is good and bad in this approach. What’s good about the whole idea is, finally, Australia gets nationally uniform regulation of the trucking industry with all of its advantages for cross border traffic and improved productivity with reduced paperwork.
What may be bad about this proposal is what the authorities have not yet told us. Which state will take on the job of being the central national regulator and how much variation will be allowed by individual state authorities in making variances from the national rules?
A worst-case scenario would be where the national regulator takes on the toughest and most difficult rules as a base for the national regulation. It would then be up to the individual states to create a large and complex set of variations from these rules to enable transport operators to continue operating under the same conditions as they are now. For example, Queensland currently allows B-triples to operate on any Type 1 road train route, whereas in New South Wales there is a virtual ban on B-triples.
There must also be a suspicion that the NSW Road Traffic Authority will be given the job as national regulator, as it is the largest state authority in Australia now. If such a move is announced the hearts of many trucking operations around the nation will sink at the prospect of more nitpicking, unnecessary overregulation, the RTA’s speciality, becoming the norm for all transport operators around Australia.
Road transport industry in Australia can only hope that if the RTA get the guernsey, the stipulations and restrictions will be placed upon them to ensure they do not become the restriction on productivity and common sense they have proved to be in the past.
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