There are many offers to help but those making them must have a strong understanding of what’s at stake
How far can automation and IT go without running us physically and metaphorically off a cliff is the question of the company owners and managers age.
It seems everyone is promising to take heavy decision-making lifting off their hands.
The pitch from truck makers and IT providers is starting to gather pace and is worth looking into at another time, but some of these offers come from traditional sources. Government is one. Always has been.
That is the stuff elections are based on. Allow us to govern you – we will do a good job of it and you will be better off for it.
Trust is the matter for judgement in these things. And if the political classes are to be judged on how they handle the trust issue itself, we all can wonder at their ability properly conduct all that goes into directing a fearsomely complex social, physical and business enterprise.
It is often said that if you can’t measure it, you can’t govern it. By the same token, if you only measure part of something and use the findings to try to change all of it, logic dictates the outcome will be other than what was expected.
This spectre haunts much debate on issues and efforts at planning in the transport and logistics realm.
Rational beings that they are, those involved refuse to believe in ghosts and poltergeists. But when it all goes pear-shaped, such as with the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, they find the outcome inexplicable.
Those who decided on creating it were addressing an issue relating to only a part of a part of the industry – the longhaul owner-driver hire and reward portion – but thought it was the whole game.
They couldn’t see and the federal bureaucracy has lost sight of the ancillary truck-owning sector, where most truck ownership resides.
Apparently the cost of measuring that majority sector properly can’t be countenanced, yet the waste involved in setting up, running and dispensing with the RSRT would cover the cost with change left over.
Now the drum is beating for ‘operator licensing’. On a superficial level, it has its attractions. Getting into the trucking industry is easy, staying afloat isn’t and potentially has risks to others. So, why not raise the bar to entry to at least ensure those entering have the financial and business skills.
So far, so ignorant of the practicalities. This would be a government program to set up and maintain.
The cost would be borne by the industry with little control of or responsibility to coming the other way.
The already busy National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) is a fan, so an argument will exist for a level playing field between the states and an avoidance of duplication.
It will need to create a compliance framework. The question then is how this will be run. Unless it grows like Topsy, the states will have to do the bull work. No duplication savings there.
Is this really the right way to go? More government and regulation in an already heavily littered landscape?
Another option might be for industry representative bodies to do it, not unlike happens in the legal and medical professions. But that entails resources they don’t have at present and ignores a salient fact about bureaucracies – business ones can be just and slow and inflexible as government ones.
Still, it is a good debate to have but thrashing out the ‘how’ and especially the ‘why’ must be extremely thorough to ensure the outcome is worth the impact.