Australian Trucking Association Chair Mark Parry used the opening of the Trucking Australia 2025 conference in Adelaide yesterday to launch the organisation’s election wishlist and release the answers provided by the Coalition and Labor Party in response.
“We developed the platform with our member associations and announced our policies during March and April,” he says.
“Our platform document consolidates our initiatives and will be a checklist for our discussions with the incoming government.”
The ATA platform calls for a $5 billion, ten year program of targeted road upgrades and zero and low tailpipe emission trucks, making the road network more resilient and urging the next government to fund eight critical road projects.
“Government policies to improve the trucking industry’s productivity would save a typical Australian household more than $400 per year, every year, on their day to day purchases,” he says.
“Together with our voucher scheme for electric trucks and renewable diesel incentives, these policies would reduce the industry’s emissions by more than 35 million tonnes of CO2 over 25 years.
“In 2035, the trucking industry’s carbon emissions would be nine per cent lower than the current business as usual projection, Deloitte Access Economics modelling shows.”
Parry says the ATA’s policy initiatives would improve safety, including its plan to resource the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) to commence no-blame safety investigations into crashes involving trucks.
“Independent inquiries have repeatedly said that we need to extend ATSB style investigations to road crashes. We need to start with crashes involving trucks; it needs to happen under the next government,” he says.
Parry says the Australian Government provides financial support to apprentices in priority occupations like electricians and mechanics but does not support truck driving even though trucking can be an apprenticeship, is an essential industry and has 26,000 positions unfilled.
“The next government should provide financial support to apprentices undertaking driving operations apprenticeships and their employers. There also need to be federal incentives for short driver training courses that go beyond getting a licence to include other skills that drivers need to succeed,” he says.
“A number of registered training organisations run these courses, which are supported by state governments, trucking industry associations or major companies.”