Michelle Tayler joined the NHVR in January 2022 to lead the Corporate Affairs Division, which includes government affairs, corporate and digital communications, media, industry engagement and customer experience.
Michelle is a qualified journalist with almost 20 years’ experience working in media, communications, engagement and corporate affairs across the private and public sectors.
Michelle began her career as a cadet journalist at a regional daily newspaper and then worked extensively in the energy and mining sectors before moving to the Queensland Government, where she held Executive Director level roles with Queensland Fire and Emergency Services and the Queensland Police Service.
Michelle presented at the NatRoad Connect 2024 conference where she spoke of the industry benefitting from a consistent heavy vehicle regulatory service now the entire eastern seaboard and Tasmania is overseen by the Regulator.
The NHVR has been operating for a decade and in April 2024 the state of Queensland transitioned responsibility for delivering heavy vehicle regulatory services, including on-road compliance and enforcement and prosecutions, and programmed heavy vehicle inspections, from Transport and Main Roads (TMR) to the NHVR, with a new head office located in Townsville which opened in June.
Queensland was the final participating jurisdiction to switch to the NHVR (Western Australia and Northern Territory continue to be stand alones) and Queensland is now the NHVR’s Northern Region under the management of Director Kelli Ready, who herself has extensive experience in leading and delivering regulatory compliance programs across various Queensland Government agencies including Queensland Police, Environmental Protection Authority, and TMR.
As part of the transition 160 new employees joined the NHVR, with 110 of them transferring from TMR.
The NHVR currently has 14 regional home base locations across Queensland, and a satellite office in Mt Isa, with staff working roadside across the state including in the far north and western areas.
“Now the work really begins in bringing consistency across the Heavy Vehicle sector,” Michelle says.
“This is the opportunity to expand our reach and work together on harmonisation. We are encouraging voluntary compliance through education and our approach around ‘inform, educate and enforce’ will continue as the keys to our compliance strategy and we are making sure the training within our team is consistent in the implementation of that. Education is the key – you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Improvements to facilities and technology are on the NHVR’s agenda including improved separation of intercept areas from live traffic lanes.
“Other key elements to enhance productivity and safety we are focusing on include infrastructure upgrades for weigh-in-motion and weighbridge facilities to reduce time required for a heavy vehicle to be stationary,” says Michelle.
The NHVR will expand its use of technology to initiate risk-based intercepts and look at vehicles of interest rather than random engagements.
“This helps identify those we need to pay attention to and those that are doing the right thing. We try to avoid intercepting them where we can,” adds Michelle.
The inclusion of Queensland under the NHVR regime should lead to benefits for operators in other states.
“From an operational outlook, one thing we are focusing on, now we’ve got all the participating jurisdictions on board, is borderless operations,” says Michelle.
“You can be sure that when crossing the border within those participating jurisdictions you are given the same experience and treated the same when you are interacting with our staff. We’re doing what we can to make sure we are working with the states to get that seamless approach.”
One aspect of compliance enforcement which is being addressed involves the differences sometimes experienced by operators between police officers and NHVR on-road officers.
“This will see the NHVR training police in terms of how to enforce the HVNL [Heavy Vehicle National Law] and this is all about achieving consistent contact,” says Michelle.
“We understand there are inconsistencies in the way in which it is currently applied, and we’re really keen to work with the police agencies to try and push the educational element as well by moving away from a heavy handed approach where it’s not needed and trying to uplift the industry through education.”
Heavy Vehicle inspection programs will be subject to review.
“Each state has a different inspection scheme in place which is obviously complex,” says Michelle.
“We are trying to work with the states to harmonise that into a national scheme and there is a lot of work happening around that to provide national consistency for inspection requirements. We have been working on the first phase of what that could potentially look like. We’ve gone out and consulted with industry and are now looking at the second design phase.”
The revised program will be intended to provide savings in time and bureaucracy engagement for operators who demonstrate consistent approaches to safety and compliance.
“The result will be risk-based using intelligence and collected data so an example of what this could look like is operators classified as high risk may require two inspections per year, medium to high risk operators once per year, medium to low risk operators every two years and low risk could be every three to five years,” says Michelle.
“We’re looking at things which reduce the burdens on those who are doing the right thing, but keeping our finger on the pulse for those who probably need a little more focus and work. We’re hoping to have a discussion paper to ministers in 2025, followed by implementation in 2026-27.”
Michelle acknowledges a frequent industry question about how owners learn if their vehicles have been intercepted and referred to a new data sharing program being launched at the end of 2024 which will be accessed via the NHVR portal which logs all intercepts.
“This will provide better oversight for owners when it comes to intercept outcomes for their vehicles but it doesn’t log driver info, just the registration details,” she says.
The NHVR has also developed strategies and resources to support the industry’s requirement for better access, particularly for PBS-style vehicles.
“It’s important that the industry sees what we are doing to work with road managers to enhance productivity and improve turn-around times for access approval,” says Michelle.
“The Freight Task Tool provides road managers the tools to simply look at various vehicle combinations and what that means to them. It also gives industry the opportunity in first instance to see if a particular vehicle was something that would pass the parameters road managers look at.”
