Union, Gillard rules driving owner-truckers out of business

A group of tip Trucks are reportedly doing a drive slow protest along the Tullamarine Freeway blocking traffic. Picture: Nicole Garmston

Before 2012, for about a decade, the Transport Workers Union consistently ran a public campaign about trucking safety and pushed for more regulation of our road transport sector.

This campaign, at first blush, appeared genuine and, indeed, a component of it probably was. Who wants the roads filled with truck drivers high on drugs? Who can disagree that good safety practices are essential? Who can argue against the need to reduce accidents and save lives?

Unfortunately, when it comes to unions, conversations about safety are often a ruse. There is usually another agenda, and in this instance there definitely was.

In November 2011, prime minister Julia Gillard lunched with union powerbrokers at Kirribilli House. “She gave the unions everything they wanted,” Martin Ferguson later said. “It was ‘lock in behind me and I will deliver for you’.”

And Gillard did, in so many ways, although not all of these ways became apparent until much later on.

In 2012, not long before Gillard was overthrown by Kevin Rudd, “safe rates” legislation was passed and a new body, the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, was set up. Hansard shows that in 2014, the Coalition’s Minister for Northern Australia Matthew Canavan reflected on the event: “I remember thinking, ‘I do not exactly know how this is going to deal with safety’ … it was something that was pushed by the Transport Workers Union at the time.”

On April 4 this year, an order issued by the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal comes into force over the road transport sector. Because of this, the ranks of the self-employed will be eliminated. Thirty-five thousand owner-drivers, the type of people who are independent, self-reliant and impossible to unionise, will be pushed out of work.

There will be bankruptcies, houses lost, families broken and possibly suicides.

After the carnage, there will be only two classes of people in the industry left: employers and employees. The union happily can make customers of them both.

The order applies only to owner-drivers, or their family members, when they drive the family-owned truck; the self-employed. It does not apply to employees or employers.

The order dictates a set of rates and conditions that owner-drivers, when they drive loads for clients, must charge by law. These rates increase the cost of delivery by between 15 per cent and 30 per cent above the market rate that ordinarily would be paid for the transport of goods. A driver who is an employee of a trucking company does not have to be paid the rates that self-employed drivers must charge. A trucking company that employs drivers does not have to charge the rates that self-employed drivers have to charge.

It is only the self-employed who are being singled out. They must be paid these rates by their clients — if not, it is the clients who legally will be held to account.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has been tasked with enforcement and, for those who breach the order, significant fines apply.

Anyone can see what is going to happen next. Thirty-five thousand people will have to dump their lifestyles and make a choice.

They can become employers or employees, but their self-employed, self-reliant, independent lifestyles and flexible businesses will no longer be feasible.

The trucks that many will have tied to mortgages on their homes will be worth less than they were. The large companies can snap up these trucks for a bargain and employ the previous owners, on wages, at lower pay rates than the order, and charge their clients whatever they want, according to the market.

I guess this is what happens when innovation runs smack into the corrupt Australian industrial relations model.

Under the Abbott government, the law was placed under review, with a report handed up 18 months ago that has been kept under lock and key ever since.

Industry participants believe it may have recommended repeal of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal.

However, key people in the Senate, who supported the law in the first place, were convinced then of its strong link to safety, and no one in government seems confident of persuading them otherwise, although no one has tried.

This unfolding disaster is an outrage and every decent person should be up in arms. We can add this issue to the list of reasons that a double-dissolution election must occur.