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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-06-02 Daily Xml
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ROAD TRAFFIC (MISCELLANEOUS) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 30 April 2009. Page 2177.)

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Leader of the Opposition) (17:08): I rise on behalf of the opposition to speak to this bill. This bill was scheduled for debate last time we sat. When it was debated in the House of Assembly the opposition supported it. At that time the opposition had not had a response from the South Australian Road Transport Association. Since we last sat we have had an opportunity to speak with the Road Transport Association. I indicate from the outset that there were some components of the legislation that were supported in the House of Assembly. However, as a party, we have now arrived at another position and will not be supporting a couple of components of this bill.

The amendment bill is proposing the introduction of two heavy vehicle initiatives: the Intelligent Access Program and Heavy Vehicle Speeding Compliance. It makes several amendments to the requirements for declaration, notification and the testing of speed and red light cameras. As I said, initially we had several concerns and we felt that new sections 110(ab) and 110(ac) in clause 6 of the bill should be amended to include details which would otherwise be included in the regulations. It appears that the new sections provide no information on the powers and obligations that are clearly going to be part of the implementation of this bill.

New section 110(ac) provides no details of obligations and powers. This program is supposed to be for monitoring and dealing with the speed of heavy vehicles and to ensure they do not deviate from approved roads. There was a concern within the industry that the bill and subsequent regulations could lead to factors being used to limit the access to the Intelligent Access Program, such as a requirement to meet vehicle emission standards.

Thankfully, I met with staff from minister Conlon's office late last month and we were able to clarify some of the concerns that we had, certainly with regard to section 110(ab), which provides that the regulations will list certain obligations of parties in the heavy vehicle chain of responsibility.

We appreciate that this is a measure to protect drivers by creating a duty for parties like loaders and other people in the chain of responsibilities to abide by business practices and curtail possibilities for speeding. There were, in this advice we were given, no additional obligations for drivers as they are already subject to infringement notices and demerit points. The power was also created for police officers to enforce these measures, just as they would apply to drivers. They feel this adequately addresses the concerns that were raised between the two houses.

New section 110(ac) provides for the establishment of the Intelligent Access Program. This is one area where we do have some concern. By regulation, the scheme would be enabled to provide for all aspects of the program. The Freight Council, in an initial consultation, conveyed concerns that the Intelligent Access Program may be used for tracking carbon emissions. However, the model provisions are concerned more with mass, speed and route and, at this point, not with emissions. There is a capacity to extend this legislation to the tracking of carbon emissions, but these changes do not provide for that, and the minister's advisers indicated that there was no current intention for that, so we do not believe that is a concern at this stage.

As I said, we have since had contact with the Road Transport Association, which has raised some significant concerns about the cost of implementing the program. Although the Road Transport Association supports the concept of the Intelligent Access Program, it envisaged that it should be a voluntary program and not a mandatory one. That is for a number of reasons but particularly in respect of compliance costs.

The Road Transport Association estimates that the cost per vehicle will probably be between $3,000 and $4,000 per vehicle and that approximately 10 per cent of 320,000 vehicles nationwide will be affected. As one can see, there are some 320,000 heavy mass vehicles that could be potentially captured by this legislation, and at $3,000 or $4,000 per vehicle it is a significant impost on small business. Some of the business operators in the transport industry are quite large, but there is also a significant number of small businesses. These people, by and large, are law-abiding transport operators.

The bill also provides that service providers will be engaged to report noncompliance to the state government. Service providers are going to be private companies which have applied for certification from Transport Certification Australia (TCA). My understanding is that this will be a monitoring body. A truck will have a GPS sender to identify where it is and what particular route it is travelling along, and these vehicles will be monitored by the service providers. One really has to question the cost of this both to the government and to the private sector. The government will be responsible for all the information received on noncompliance of vehicles under the scheme, and we wonder about the administrative burden that places on the scheme.

The legislation provides that vehicles under this scheme will be penalised if the vehicle loses satellite coverage so, potentially, through no fault of the driver of the vehicle, he could be penalised. Also, we are not quite sure of the effectiveness of that if somebody sticks some sort of blanketing device (a tin can or something) over the top of the satellite sender which means they could cheat the system, and the penalties may not be sufficient to override that cheating. I will come back to that in a moment, because there are some more areas that I want to explore and perhaps put some questions on the record so that the minister can answer them before the committee stage of the bill.

Another small issue that this bill also addresses is the change in intervals, from six to 27 days, at which the accuracy of the speed function of red light cameras is tested. We were intrigued as to why it should be expanded from six days to 27 days. SAPOL attended the briefing and confirmed that it was really just due to the rostering cycle that it be done once every 28 days.

In Victoria, it is done every 30 days and, given that this is actually testing of the accuracy of the induction loops that are buried beneath the road and the distance between them does not change more than a millimetre or two with hot weather or ground movement, the opposition certainly sees that it is a reasonable amendment to allow that to be pushed out to 27 days.

I will come back to some of the comments that the Road Transport Association has made to me, and the first point is that, in its view, there is no demonstrable cost benefit to support this initiative. The association says that the cost per vehicle is probably close to $3,000, and would have to deliver a benefit to the operator of at least that amount. It would need to provide new access or new routes, not just be applied retrospectively to existing routes or otherwise operators would not be able to derive benefit.

For members who do not understand, this program is for higher mass vehicles going on a designated route. I am sure members will all be aware of the tragic accident a couple of weeks ago where a young girl sadly lost her life in an accident with a B-double. They are the types of vehicles that we are talking about: big trucks and vehicles on designated routes. If it is just to monitor people on existing routes, the industry cannot see any cost benefit and, as I said, the vast majority are law-abiding transport operators who do not break the rules.

The cost benefit needs should be assessed by the business that would have to implement it and not according to a theoretical concept based on assumptions made by bureaucrats somewhere in government departments. The focus of most ministers, or at least the focus of the advice from the officials, would seem to indicate that they believe that the Intelligent Access Program would ensure compliance, or at least greater compliance, by keeping operators under constant surveillance. It is very much like Big Brother to me.

The Intelligent Access Program is reasonably easy to defeat, according to advice from the Road Transport Association. All that government or third-party providers would know is that a truck is off the radar and, even if a penalty is imposed for that, it would not offset the benefit that the minority of the industry who cheat—those who are targeted by the program—would derive by going off the approved routes.

Many operations, such as higher mass limit trips (when a truck carries more than a statutory mass limit but only on an approved higher mass load accreditation scheme), do not involve the entire journey, so an Intelligent Access Program would be needed for the initial part of the trip when it is fully loaded. When the first delivery is made en route, thus lowering the mass, the truck may not have to stick to the approved route because it has a lower mass. It would be very difficult for the system to know that the operator had taken 5 tonnes of product off the back of his truck and was now at a lower mass.

This is one of the questions that I would like to ask the minister to respond to: how will this be monitored? If a person is driving a vehicle along a higher mass route and takes off some of their produce or their load, how will the system know without the driver of the vehicle having to log in via a Blackberry or a laptop or some other method to actually advise the system that they have taken some load off? It makes me wonder about the cost of compliance and the onerous task on the truck operators.

Of course, if that is the case and the minister is proposing that the truck operator will grab their Blackberry and send a text message or a little email to the system, it will not stop one of the cheats in the system—the minority—from sending an email to say, 'I've just dumped 10 tonnes and now I'm able to go on this particular other route.'

It raises a number of questions as to how that would really work. If the compliant operators—all 90-plus per cent of them—pay the price of this Intelligent Access Program, their cheating competitors will, of course, always get a competitive advantage if they are able to thwart the systems.

It seems that it is a particularly large administrative burden on our trucking industry at a time when we have—as the minister often says and has said even today in question time—an economic crisis the like of which we have never seen before. It really does call into question the need for this measure at this point in time.

Certainly, the Road Transport Association is very much opposed to a mandatory Intelligent Access Program. It does, however, support a voluntary option, but only where it is genuinely optional. That is not the case in New South Wales where, the association says, it was falsely claimed that it was optional but, in fact, was mandated for a wide range of route access in a retrospective fashion.

The desire of the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure and the South Australian government to impose the Intelligent Access Program at any and every opportunity, such as for low-loaders carrying bulldozers, as a means of facilitating access to various restricted routes (that is, those that are not gazetted already) is impractical because they have not understood the cost per truck which is simply not justified for the very limited use that the low-loader operators would actually make of it.

The Intelligent Access Program should be seen as a tool that could be a way of facilitating various improvements in monitoring by operators themselves and by government, but first the government must sit down with industry and work out an effective way to operate and manage an intelligent access program which will deliver real and sustainable benefits for those who have to pay the substantial costs, who, of course, will be the operators. Incidentally, in relation to the New South Wales' scheme in which many operators have been forced to pre-enrol in the Intelligent Access Program to get access to the routes, more than 80 per cent of operators have withdrawn as they do not see that it will deliver any cost benefit to them.

With those comments and in supporting the Road Transport Association concerns, the opposition has quite a number of concerns about, first, the cost imposition on transport operators—and I would certainly like the minister's feedback when we get to the committee stage of the bill—and, secondly, the cost of service providers. If you have a body or an organisation monitoring all these vehicles, who will pay for that? Will the cost be borne by government and the broader taxpayers or will it be borne by the industry? What does the minister see as the benefit to the community for the cost? The industry estimates that in excess of 90 per cent of operators operate within the law, so why do they see this as being an important step, especially at this time, given the financial crisis and the pressure that is on pretty much every one of our small and large business operators in Australia at present?

With those few words, I indicate that we will be supporting all but the clause relating to the Intelligent Access Program. We think that is inappropriate and does not provide a real cost benefit to the industry or to the community.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J.M. Gazzola.

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