Talking about trucks
The Australian Trucking Association have declared the week of February 20th to 27th to be Truckweek. The plan is to nationally co-ordinate activities to get the issues confronting the trucking industry in front of politicians and the general public in a concerted effort to raise our industry’s profile.
Concept sound familiar? Yes, it is an attempt to replicate the successful start to the Transport Awareness Weeks in the nineties. At a time when the ATA (then the RTF) was growing fast they mobilised trucking enthusiasts to organise a large number of events around the country and got the subject of trucking onto the lips of politicians and the media in many areas for a week.
As with all of these kinds of events the initial impetus began to fade and the focus of the organisation moved elsewhere, but there were several years of a successful PR campaign for trucking.
One event still keeps the flame alive, the Transport Awareness Day in Newcastle has not missed a beat and still draws large crowds raising not insignificant sums for the Westpac helicopter.
Could the Truckweek not have used the impetus still there in Newcastle to build a new intitiative? The timing was obviously wrong from the ATA’s point of view. However, it is good to see the timing works well in Queensland, with the last day of Truckweek coinciding with one of the bigger events of its kind, the Lights on the Hill convoy on February 27th when hundreds of trucks roll into Gatton to commemorate truckies killed on our highways.
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