The directors and managers of trucking businesses should have the same rights as other Australians. They should be innocent until proven guilty of offences under the national truck laws.
That’s one of the key recommendations in the ATA’s submission to the Queensland parliamentary inquiry into the planned national truck laws.
Under clauses 576, 578 and 579 of the draft laws, every director, executive officer, partner or unincorporated business manager will automatically commit an offence if their business commits a chain of responsibility offence.
They will all be presumed guilty and will have to prove their innocence.
For example:
• The finance manager of a trucking business will be presumed guilty of an offence if the business is convicted of a fatigue law breach, even if he has nothing to do operating trucks;
• In many small, unincorporated trucking businesses, one partner drives a truck and the other does the books and organises work from home. The partner staying at home will be presumed guilty of an offence if the driving partner is caught speeding.
The presumption of innocence is the golden thread that runs through our legal system. Trucking business directors and managers should have the same legal rights as other Australians.
Under our proposed amendments, trucking business managers could still be prosecuted personally for road transport law breaches, but the prosecution would have to prove its case.
That’s the way we used to do things in Australia, and it’s the way we should still do things now.
The recommendations in the ATA submission would also improve safety by imposing positive duties on businesses and individuals to prevent overloading. Trucking businesses, loading managers and people sending and receiving freight would all have clear duties about preventing mass, dimension and load restraint breaches. This would improve compliance and safety on our roads.
At the same time, though, we’ve proposed reducing the penalties for truck drivers found guilty of mass, dimension and load restraint offences.
The maximum penalties currently range from $3000 to $10,000 for a severe risk breach.
These penalties are dramatically out of line with the others in the draft law. It is difficult to see why a driver should be subject to a $10,000 penalty for a severe mass breach, when a driver who commits a severe fatigue breach is subject to a penalty that tops out at $6000.
More than half the economic benefits of the national truck laws are expected to come from increasing the use of combinations like B-doubles and B-triples on the road network.
We’ll only get these benefits if local councils and other road managers make better decisions about the sort of vehicles that can use their roads.
Unfortunately, the access measures in the draft law are not strong enough to deliver better decisions. Our submission recommends four sets of amendments.
Some local councils can take 150 days to decide on a road access application. Our amendments would impose time limits with teeth. Road managers would need to make decisions within 28 days, or within six months with the approval of the regulator. If they did not meet the deadline, either with a yes or a no, they would be deemed to have consented.
Most importantly, though, our amendments would enable applicants for road access to appeal decisions to an independent, external review body.
The draft law includes an internal appeals process, but this could just involve the council officer at the next desk reviewing a colleague’s decision.
We say that trucking operators should be able to appeal access decisions to their state administrative appeals body – so the application could be judged, on its merits, by an independent reviewer with experience in considering appeals from across the whole state.
Stuart St Clair
Chief Executive