Rachel Smith started her career in recruitment and moved to the association management space when she relocated to Canberra over 11 years ago.
Rachel worked for one of the most powerful lobby groups in Australia, the 6,000-member Pharmacy Guild, and moved on to her involvement with transport associations as Head of Government and Policy at the Australian Logistics Council (ALC) where she also served for a time as interim CEO.
Rachel has expertise in policy and government relations, member services and operations management.
Prime Mover: It could be said ALC and the ALRTA are at different ends of the transport spectrum. What sort of challenges do they have that are common?
Rachel Smith: They’ll both be across the transport sector regardless of the mode, in terms of how we get interconnectivity and the productivity uplift, and part of that is through sensible investment in infrastructure. The whole transport sector, regardless of size of any entity or mode, is suffering from skill shortages and the challenge is how do we attract more females and diverse work groups into the sector and skill them to suit Australian conditions. There are still challenges around how do we meet the decarbonisation agenda and also how do we continually improve safety outcomes for drivers.
PM: Rural transport associations have brought transport decarbonisation to the fore of discussions. Is that a conscious approach?
RS: There are unique challenges between rural and regional settings, and urban and metro settings. Australia is the most urbanised country in the world, with around 90 per cent of our population living in the cities on the eastern seaboard, so by nature a lot of public policy is very urban-centric. Australia has some unique challenges in terms of its size. There’s not a lot happening in the centre of the country and the distances we travel are very different to overseas countries. Even when you look at the United States and other very populated countries that are large in area, we don’t have our population spread evenly across our country so we have some very unique challenges. Often when we talk about decarbonisation it’s pinned to examples like Norway and Finland and the EU which are all very densely populated yet they’re relatively small countries. So some of the various decarbonisation solutions might work in those environments but in Australia we are more spread out and we travel longer distances. So for us, we’re electrifying the network for cars and light vehicles but the reality is you can’t take a roadtrain from Darwin to Adelaide using electricity at the moment. We just don’t currently have the technology to meet the large heavy duty freight task in Australia.
PM: Given that situation, should rural and remote transport be treated differently by government?
RS: Rural and regional transport in Australia is unique but there needs to be some different focus on how we decarbonise it and I think some investment in other technologies that aren’t based on electrification needs to occur. At the moment what we are seeing is the government is not being technology agnostic in terms of where their investment goes. We heard at the recent ALRTA conference in Toowoomba there are some great leaps and bounds happening in biofuels and renewable diesel, both of which would be able to be run in existing internal combustion engines, but we are not seeing a lot of government investment in those technologies. We recently saw the United States walk back from their 2030 emissions targets because it was going to be too expensive for manufacturers and consumers.
PM: What other challenges will be facing rural transport in the coming five or ten years?
RS: I think we are going to see further pressures on the workforce and attracting people to the industry, and some of that is driven by lack of housing in regional areas. I have a member who has actually bought a unit block so he can attract staff to work for him, because there was such a shortage of affordable housing in the area in which he operates. We have members who are sponsoring overseas mechanics and they also want to get some drivers. Due to the shortage of truck drivers at the moment, as part of employing someone under a skilled worker visa you need to pay them a minimum amount of salary but there also needs to be a guarantee they can access suitable housing.
PM: During the pandemic, for too short a time, the general public were very supportive of what the transport industry was doing for them. Do you think all that goodwill has now evaporated?
RS: Unfortunately, yes. The public has a very short attention span. One of the few good things of the pandemic was people could now understand what a supply chain is. There is a better understanding of just how integral the transport industry is, but I think the value that was placed on truck drivers, in particular, has diminished. We’re not seeing a lot of parents who support kids who say, ‘I want to be a truck driver’ when in reality they could have a very long and successful career in the industry. You might start on the tools or in the truck and then go on to a management position whether its compliance, or operations, or training. There are lots of options there. The question is how do we bring back to the forefront the conversations we were having about truck drivers and transport we had in the pandemic?
PM: Is regional transport an attractive proposition for operators and workers?
RS: The nature of the people in the industry in the ‘bush’ is they want to run a good business, they want to give back to their community, and they want to look after their staff. They require someone competent to drive a very expensive piece of machinery with a very valuable load. One of the challenges transport faces as a whole is people don’t see it as a skilled workforce, when in fact the drivers are highly skilled and their goal is to ultimately get their load where it needs to go safely and efficiently and then to get back home to their family safely.
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