Trucking Australia conference told the NHVR may take three to five years to reach maturity.
Trucking operators have been told they may need to wait up to five years to experience the full benefits of the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR).
National Transport Commission (NTC) CEO Paul Retter says regulatory bodies generally take between three and five years to fully develop their processes and capabilities, and he expects a similar timeframe for the NHVR.
He says he is working with NHVR CEO Sal Petroccitto to aid the organisation until it is capable of standing on its own.
“In my view, having been a regulator, it’s about a three to five year journey for a regulator from when they start to when they have mature processes and capabilities and are delivering the sort of consistency that you would want,” Retter says.
“That’s a difficult road and what NTC is doing as part of our job is to assist Sal and his team actually getting to where they need to be.”
Petroccitto agrees with Retter’s assessment, but emphasises that it does not mean the industry will need to wait up to five years to notice improvements from the switch to the NHVR.
“Absolutely not. There is a planned approach, we’re putting the steps in place, the processes and all the things that we’ve now done is starting to build to what will ultimately be a fully, functioning effective regulator,” Petroccitto tells ATN.
“If I look at our current program and work, the reality is that we are probably heading to that three to five year to be a fully, truly effective, efficient, self-regulating entity. So you’ve harmonised the law, it’s been transitioned over to us to manage, we’ve got road managers accepting the role of a regulator, we fully understand what our roles and responsibilities are.”
Retter says a review of load restraint guidelines the NTC has been tasked with is something that should have fallen to the NHVR, but adds that the agency has a lot of issues to deal with at the moment.
“Where NTC has the capability and where we have the expertise to do some of NHVR’s work we will do that and we will continue to do that until such time as Sal has developed the processes, matured the organisation so that it can take on all of those additional tasks,” he says.
Retter made the comments during a speech at the Australian Trucking Association’s (ATA) Trucking Australia event, where he highlighted the need to deliver upon the $12 billion in benefits over 20 years that industry was promised from the introduction of the NHVR.
“Quite frankly, I think it’s fair to say that we’re at the start of that journey in terms of delivering those benefits. There is a lot more to be done. Sal and I know that and a lot of our focus is over the next three to five years going to be about delivering on what was promised back in 2010,” he says.
Part of that work involves improving the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL), which Retter says “is not best practice”.
“In my view it is a compromise. It is what could be achieved with all the states and territories as we formulated the national law,” he says.
“We need to take the law from where it is today to something which is much more akin to best practice legislation in terms of both outcomes-based, risk-based legislation as opposed to inconsistencies, prescription where we perhaps don’t need it and so on and so forth.”
But Retter says it will take some time to achieve the goal given the necessary steps involved in trying to alter the law.
“It’s complex because we need to get all the jurisdictions on board every time we want to change part of the Act or part of the regulations and then we have to get it through the Queensland Parliament, which means we need to sequence it at the right time of the year,” he says.
“It’s a long journey to get that done.”
Under the HVNL, any changes to the law must first pass the Queensland Parliament. The parliaments of the other jurisdictions that have adopted the HVNL are then responsible for passing the changes to ensure cross-border consistency.