The RSRT is gone for the next three years but, for those not intimately affected, it was always one swatch of a bigger picture
The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal (RSRT) has been the transport and logistics story of the decade.
And it’s been a little unhealthy in an observational sense because these developments have all but sucked the life out of others of similar importance.
Moves are afoot to give official recognition and, therefore, legal weight, to codes of practice formulated by industry representative groups, as well as to adjust the executive responsibility regime.
These are generally supported by the broad industry.
Known commonly by the sobriquet ‘lobby groups’, industry groups are regarded by some more broadly as leaches on the body politic.
In a society where blindness to the transport industry it stares at every day through the windscreen is a given, it is easy for its enemies to paint the ‘road lobby’ as all-powerful.
This fallacy, ironically bolstered by its RSRT win, is difficult to shift while the indispensable service industry provides government is too often ignored.
Ignorant commentary and base accusations will doubtless arise should populists, in the media and elsewhere, wish to tar and feather a transport executive, blameless or otherwise, if something goes wrong under any new responsibility regime.
For the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) is being amended with regards to executive officer liability and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) will run the rule over industry systems such as the Australian Trucking Association’s (ATA’s) TruckSafe program.
Such initiatives can act as plates of armour for transport executives but, like armour, they don’t just put themselves on.
And it’s important to know from which direction the slings and arrows are coming so they can be fitted properly but, then, it’s always better to avoid needing them if at all possible.
Speaking of direction, where the RSRT went had a certain inevitability to it.
It just took so long to happen that many wondered if the government had the gumption to make it happen.
After all, the Jaguar Report, which by itself suited the government’s agenda enough to be all it needed to prosecute the case for abolition, had been sat on for two years.
We might be generous and say that waiting for the mandated review by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has reasonable weight as PwC wrote the regulatory impact statement, was just the sort of probity we would hope our politicians would always engage in.
With an election campaign in the offing, the execution ended up being very swift indeed.
Labor and the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) have each suffered a nasty black eye.
It may well be a speed-bump for Labor but it will also count as a setback, albeit minor, for Bill Shorten, given the RSRT was his baby.
For the TWU, it and the election are disasters, though by no means an existential ones, and the campaign for its return will continue.
The RSRT poisons further the water with a huge proportion of owner-drivers, perhaps for decades to come. And, despite a sometimes bilious campaign to woo public support, it failed to gain wider traction.
Crossbenchers old and new will be wary of easily supporting any TWU-backed initiatives in future and Labor hard-heads will have reason to be a bit more so when examining the opportunity costs.
Meanwhile, when eyes are lowered in scouring all that RSRT detail, it can be easy to lose the wider perspective.
Linfox and Toll, who have always been alive to the ‘realpolitik’ of industrial relations, have lost some reputational skin in this game.
The transport segment of the so called ‘big end of town’ will be glad their mega-customers, along with the banks, are severely on the nose, with the bigger headlines that entails.
Where some on the far Right see friends being made of an ‘enemy’s enemy’ purely in transport competition terms, that view fails to appreciate the need for options when there is are hefty power imbalance in a markets ruled by duopolies or something close to them.
An east African tribe has a saying: “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.”
Time out has been called on the RSRT trampling, but only on one side and the fight isn’t over.