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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-10-16 Daily Xml
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GRAIN HARVEST

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (15:24): I would just like to report to the house in my time today that the South Australian harvest for 2013 has begun, and it looks like being a good crop. It may not quite reach the record levels of the 2010 harvest, but we will wait and see; it is early days yet. I understand that they are reaping at the moment on the West Coast, west of Ceduna, down the eastern coastline of Eyre Peninsula and also in the upper north, so good luck to all the farmers in the task that lies ahead in the next six or eight weeks. Harvest spreads slowly across the state, from west, north, south and east.

It is a gigantic freight task to shift the annual harvest in this state. First of all, the grain needs to be shifted from the paddock to the receival depot or silo, as it is commonly called, and ultimately from that silo depot to the port to be exported to other parts of the world. Most of this freight task is done by road. If you care to drive around the state's roads at the moment, you will see any number of large vehicles, heavy vehicle mass, road trains, B-doubles, singles semis and truck and trailer combinations handling the task.

It is also at this time of the year that many of my colleagues and I begin to receive an incredible number of complaints from those involved in the trucking industry, those involved in the harvest process. Generally those complaints relate to pedantic policing and, more importantly, to the amount of regulation and the number of regulations that the trucking industry has to abide by.

I know for certain that the vast majority—way above the vast majority—of people who drive or operate trucks or operate heavy vehicles try to do the right thing. We are about to have in place the heavy vehicle regulator, which will be a national body charged with regulating the heavy vehicle industry. However, the problem is that it is not yet in place. This parliament passed the legislation back in July for implementation in October. October is here and we have no sign of it yet. The latest I have heard is that it should be implemented in January next year. Well, of course, we have completely missed the boat for this harvest, and one of the upshots of that is that there are no national diaries available.

I have in front of me a letter that I received from someone involved with the trucking industry who indicates how incredulous he was when he discovered that he could not get a new diary on the completion of his previous diary because the national regulator was not yet in place. That is one example of how our trucking industry has been left in a vacuum, with the impending implementation of this regulator about to happen but not quite. So you have to wonder about the tardiness of the bureaucracy relating to this.

It does not bear well for the future, I have to say, because even though the opposition supported this legislation at the time, in my contribution to the debate I warned against the amount of regulation we were imposing on this industry, and I still feel the same. It is a very serious consideration that we as legislators need to make. There is only so much that any particular sector can withstand, and I really feel that the heavy vehicle and transport industry are feeling somewhat browbeaten at this stage.

As I have said many times in this place, we are competing in a global marketplace. We need to be competitive, and anything that undermines that competitiveness does not stand us in good stead. The amount of compliance, regulation and red tape across many industries, and particularly today and at this time with the trucking industry, needs to be seen to be believed. I think what has happened is that departments are simply not keeping pace with the development of the industry sectors in this state.

In closing, I will just touch on the old chestnut of road gazettal. On Eyre Peninsula, in particular, and right across the state, roads need to be gazetted for road trains to drive on them. Road trains have become the almost universal form of grain transport and, at this time of the year, we are finding that road trains are allowed on some roads and not on others. This is a problem.

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