MATTERS OF INTEREST

SAFE RATES CAMPAIGN

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (15:19): I rise to draw member's attention to the Transport Workers Union Safe Rates campaign, a campaign that aims to improve the safety of the truck drivers who criss-cross the country night and day, the truckies who carry fuel to our service stations, food to our supermarkets and shops, the goods and materials we produce for domestic purposes—and for export—to our airports and wharves, building materials to our construction sites, and much, much more. These truckies, whose cabs are their offices, are just as entitled to a safe working environment and reasonable pay levels as any of us here are.

It has been said that truckies are the backbone of our country, and I think that is a pretty good call. What is unfair, though, is the fact that these professional drivers risk injury and death on a daily basis. Indeed, I believe that they suffer a workplace fatality rate 11 times the industrial average. This unacceptable risk is undoubtedly due to the often onerous schedules and delivery deadlines imposed on them by businesses and their consignors. I am talking in particular about truckies who are compelled to drive to schedules set by corporate wholesalers and retailers. Those schedules mean pressure to drive for longer periods, when tired, or in hazardous weather, to drive vehicles that, due to time constraints, may not be optimally maintained.

Coupled with low rates of pay and incentive rates, the result can only be a risk to driver safety and health, and that is a combination that spells danger for all road users. For more than two decades, the TWU, truckies and their colleagues in the supply chain have worked towards a fairer road transport industry, one that provides safe pay rates for truckies and safer roads for all Australians, but the Safe Rates campaign is being threatened.

The big industry players—the major supermarket chains and their associated petrol outlets—now hold one in every three dollars of revenue from road freight, but they have persistently failed to shoulder their responsibility to help make the road freight sector fairer. The Transport Workers Union has now asked the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal to introduce stronger obligations on the freight supply chain to make sure that drivers are paid sufficiently to enable them to work without jeopardising safety and health.

The TWU have advocated over a long period of time that both owner-drivers and employee drivers need minimum rates and it wants all parties to the supply chain to support the approach. The TWU also wants companies to get more involved in the creation and implementation of safe driving plans and to contribute financially through a levy system towards training specific to the truck driving sector. One may ask why. Here is why: I am advised that research demonstrates that a 10 per cent increase in pay means a more than 18 per cent decrease in crash probability, and that benefit increases as pay rates increase. It is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, we know that the federal Coalition has made it pretty clear that it intends to review the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which holds the big trucking companies to account. If that review leads to its abolition—a likely scenario, given the new government's close links to the big end of town—then the safety of truckies, and by extension all road users, will suffer. It is crystal clear that the only thing that stands between truck drivers and continued exploitation is their union: the Transport Workers Union.

I commend the Safe Rates campaign and I urge all who really give a dam about working Australians to support the TWU in its mission to improve the remuneration, the safety and the well being of truck drivers, without whom this country would quite literally grind to a halt.