etruck.com.au

The announcement in recent days of the agreement by the transport ministers of Australia to pursue the laudable aim of producing a national regulation by the Australian road transport industry is supposed to fill our hearts with joy in the expectation the stupidity of differences in legislation from one state to the other will end.

It is difficult to believe the Nirvana of a world where a truck, a trailer, a load, a safety procedure and a permit will be accepted from Cape York to Dubbo to East Gippsland to Port Hedland will ever exist. The idea the rules and regulations facing Australian truck drivers and truck operators will be consistent and the same throughout the entire country is just about impossible to believe.

We have spent all our lives working in the transport industry living with the discrepancies between jurisdictions and customising our working practices to meet the lowest common denominator in the myriad rules we face when travelling around Australia. These silly little differences in wording of certain rules have been a boon for the individual state’s finances as drivers and operators get pinged for doing the right thing in one state but finding out it is the wrong thing just over the border.

All of the states will pass the required legislation to set up the national regulations but the difference will be in the fine print and each individual state will do exactly as they have done with every other attempt at nationally homogeneous rules for the transport industry. They will probably tinker with them leaving us no better off than we are today, jumping through different hoops for each separate state’s legislation.