Why am I not surprised that someone from the Institute of Public Affairs would put costs above lives.
The fact is when revenue is tight people stretch the rules and themselves and that leads to deaths.

I think ultimately we should be reducing the number of trucks on our roads and increasing the use of rail.

I was bored over the weekend and created the
“KILL TEN BIRDS WITH ONE STONE PLAN”:
How To Fix Our Infrastructure Issues, Welfare, Foreign Labour, Foreign Aid, Inmate Costs, Unpaid Student Debts, Refugees, Immigration, Nationalism, and Multicultural Issues All with the Single Stroke Of A Pen.

But I don't know if its dumb or if it would work or not, sometime my mind goes off on weird tangents..
Its all about my massively non-viable big ideas from the HSR discussion.

Welfare "Earn Your Entitlements" policy, where its not an entitlement that is freely given but one that is earned.
You do a months work to earn entitlement to a further 3months unemployment benefits.
End Foreign Aid and offer them jobs instead.
But we don't pay them our award wages based on our economy, we pay based on their country and we feed and house them.
(Could this idea fix the world)
Inmates and Community Service
Sentences will be halved for non violent offenders who are prepared to work for the greater good.
Unpaid HECS Debts - the person will have to work off their debt if they aren't already working and aren't paying off their debt.
Appease the Nationalists - stop giving foreigners handouts and bridge the gap between Australians and foreigners.

It all surrounds building infrastructure projects that are too expensive to do on our own, and therefore these workers do not take anyones jobs away, but building the infrastructure creates jobs and job opportunities and makes our country more competitive.

This is just another non-issue for gormless politicians to windbag about while the whole country goes down the gurgler. Self-interest, greed and power by the few is the main game in Australia. All heavy road transport is a threat to the safety of all motorists. Long distance haulage by road should stop altogether.

I generally agree with this article. For the self employed, work being unavailable is worse than work being insufficiently lucrative. The way to improve heavy vehicle safety isn't to regulate prices, it's to ensure the drivers can't get away with breaking the rules. GPS based tracking should be compulsory on all trucks (ASAP for most vehicles, but those that already have tachographs should be able to use those instead for a few years).

Could the author please inform us who funded this work? I'm personally of the view that the the RSRT is a poorly-conceived and unnecessary interference in the free market. However, I just wanted to know whether anyone connected to either side of the argument has funded this work.

This whole discussion is about very little. Owner-drivers, when I was Operatione Engineer of a large trucking fleet, were called "the hungries". We had both company and OD trucks in a happily mixed workforce.

I personally don't much go for single issue "tribunals" of any kind and certainly don't expect any good to come from the trucking industry's version, so I won't miss it when it is gone. I don't care.

The real game here is the Coalition's lack of any positive policies at all - not a single one. Internal divisions have frozen the policy-making function of government. They simply cannot govern in the absense of policy.

The result is that the Coalition is proceeding hell-for-leather with the three policies that they can agree on:
Policy 1. Ditch the trucking tribunal.
Policy 2. Reinstate a building industry anti-corruption watchdog which only previously existed for 3 or 4 years of the 116 since Federation. How essential is that, especially when the same government is not willing to consider appointing a federal ICAC?
Policy 3. Use these two insignificant issues to force a fresh election, in the hope that the results of the last election will somehow not be repeated.

Good luck with that!

What is Plan B, Mr Prime Minister? What will you do if the Senate doesn't award you an absolute majority of seats? Will you put up another couple of minor bills, have them knocked back, and head into another double dissolution next year? Or will you discover the meaning of the words "negotiation" and "compromise"?

“Indeed, the RSRT is a useful case study illustrating that governments hastily take action to instigate damaging regulations and bureaucracies, but are painfully slow to unwind them even in the face of mounting problems.”

The TWU pushed for the RSRT to be set up as it envisaged that the safety issue could be used as a clever decoy for formulating regulations to force owner drivers out of the industry. Julia Gillard ignored that the resulting lessening in transport competition would be contrary to the national interest, and instead decided that RSRT implementation would be a good way of thanking a key electoral benefactor.

It is surprising that, after the Coalition Government initially identified the urgency of the need to rescind the RSRT, effectively little was done about it. After knifing Tony Abbott in the back, did not Malcolm Turnbull promise much more action on the economic front? Yet Malcolm, great ditherer that he is, as recently as a few weeks ago favoured moving RSRT rescission to the next parliament.

Given that Malcolm has effectively achieved nothing in the seven months of playing Prime Minister, he certainly cannot be regarded as a man of action. With the benefit of hindsight, the Coalition would have done much better had they encouraged Malcolm to go into retirement when he lost the Opposition leadership in 2009.

Those Coalition MPs who feared they would lose their seat in the 2016 election if they stuck with Abbott, now would be justified in thinking that they will not be returning to Canberra after the coming election, if the current polls are an indication.

Cobber,

Given the somewhat feeble link between pay rates and road deaths, it is mind blowing that even die hard unionists could argue that owner truck drivers would be better off unemployed.

It's clear that neither Labor nor the unions give a crap about truck drivers, only the $220 000 handout to the unions from the RSRT and protecting union jobs.

Well what a surprise another underdone member of apparatchik class from the IPA the bunch who want small Govt but jump on the gravy train as soon as the Right wing Liberals ask them which to me means Abbott will return if the Libs win the spurious DD.
Now about the front organisation in the Trucking industry called the ICA which is a front group of the IPA along with the Owner drivers association are all tied to the IPA and by extension the Liberal party of Australia.
The sight if Truffles and that screeching harridan Cash lecturing there own front organisation about how dreadful it is to have something that may destroy the last refuge of piece work in the trucking Ind.
its a joke one bunch of Liberals telling their owners in the IPA its ok to go an cause road accidents that kill people because the employers are screwing them into the ground on Prices.
Mind you the Owners Drivers cut each others throats to undercut each other and this place gets a wet behind the ears boy to to give the IPA who run the people described excuses please

John Ryan,

While it's sensible to be suspicious of anything that has IPA backing, it is stupid to dismiss it out of hand.

Paying drivers more won't fix the safety problems.
Regulating prices (and effectively forcing some of them to drive for nothing when the market can't support the imposed minimum rate) definitely won't fix the safety problems.
But tracking all trucks would fix a lot of the safety problems.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Armchair,

What sort of work would it be, and would it be available for more than a month?

What jobs would you offer the foreign aid recipients instead? What about foreign medical aid? What about disaster relief?

Why should those unlucky enough not to reach the HECS repayment threshold have to work extra? Would pensioners still be liable?

I don't understand what you're proposing about bridging the gap between Aussies and foreigners.

Those infrastructure projects are not actually too expensive to do on our own, but governments regard maintaining the illusion of fiscal responsibility as more important than doing what actually needs to be done.

@ Aidan (Monday, 18 April 2016 4:10:53 PM):

"Those infrastructure projects are not actually too expensive to do on our own, but governments regard maintaining the illusion of fiscal responsibility as more important than doing what actually needs to be done."

+1

Aidan:

Agreed.

Simple solutions to complex problems are only attractive to simpletons who don't understand the question.

So make fun of my ideas if you want, they might be stupid, but I'm just trying to find ways for our country to save money, and be more productive and competitive against a backdrop where we've lost jobs and manufacturing and the people who profited from taking those jobs and industry have now purchased our country.
If we we're playing a game of monopoly, and someone else owns Mayfair and Park Lane, plus the green set and the railways and utilities the game is won.
We're just the poor player who keeps hemoraging money until he goes bust.

My idea basically came from the idea that some of these infrastructure problems are too expensive to afford.
And my idea was "What if we can find 100,000 workers? Can we afford it them?"

Some of the jobs on the projects might be:
Mobile Dwelling Assembly and Maintenance Jobs
- Building, Assembling and Maintenance of Mobile Dwellings
Settlement Jobs
- Cleaning and Maintenance of Mobile Dwellings
- Food Preparation
- Laundry
Farming Jobs
Timber Clearing Jobs
- Chainsaw Operator
- Tractor Drivers
Earthworks Jobs
- Front-End Loader Operators
- Truck Drivers
- Excavator Operators
Other Jobs
- Old Track Removal
- Sun Farms
- Quarry
- Loading and Unloading Shipments
- Building
- Fencing

I'd offer foreigners all of these jobs, but I'm not paying them our wages.
If they earn $2 or $5 an hour in their country, then we'll pay them that plus a 25% premium, and when they take their money home they can pay tax in their own country. It helps them and it helps us, and it doesn't take away any existing jobs.

Foreign medical aid and disaster releif, we'll thats a whole different discussion but I will say that when we have aussies dying on public hospital waiting lists I'm not sure whether its borderline treason to put foreigners first, but it is good to try to help others out when they are in genuine need.

Should the HECS people contribute more - Yes they should.
If the government is going to invest in them, they need to take that seriously and make all efforts to complete their studies.
If they don't then by default, they're saying they belong as blue-collar workers and should work to repay the debt they decided to create.

Pensioners?
I'm not running a socialist regime, I have respect for aussies who have already done their bit for the nation.

Not too expensive?
I'm talking about a 6 lane per-direction concrete highway from Darwin through every mainland capital city to Perth with 4 HSR lines, water, oil, gas, power and internet, and a Super-Port in Darwin, a second section from Darwin south past Alice Spings so that southern areas such as Kalgoorlie have better access to the northern port, and then a third eastern inland route branching off at Gulf of Carpentaria inland and meeting up at Port Pirie.
We're talking trillions, which on a per capita basis is well unaffordable.
But build the infrastructure so that the energy to run it is generated from it so that the main transport costs in this country are reduced virtually to zero.

Think about how we do things..
Lets say we have someone who owes $1000 in fines.
It costs upwards of $50,000 p/a to keep someone incarcerated so we say you have to go to jail at $100 a day, so that's 10 days.
"You owe us $1000 so we've decided the best thing to do is spend another $1000 or so putting a roof and food in your mouth for a week or so..."

Does that not seem dumb to you?

Do you think its good that the 'work for the dole' people are whipper-snipping churches and retirement homes, working in lifeline and meals on wheels and clearing the weeds under power lines for private companies instead of doing something something more constructive?
I'm not saying these things are bad, but don't you think its better to get them out there and give them some real skills and do something positive?

And so many other topics I mentioned but didn't go really go into.

Where I stated that doing this might break down barriers between nationalistic Australians and foreigners is that if they are out there working together they might find they have things in common and Aussies might have more respect for them because they are doing something to earn their keep instead of getting a free hand-out.

Hi, Armchair.

I have, at various stages in my life, employed and/or arranged training for more than half of the skills which you mention. I'm proud of the results, which at one end of the scale resulted in a long term unemployed young man gaining fencing, excavator and chainsaw training and never looking back. Five years later, he is still in full-time work. I guess that saved the nation a few bob, as well as keeping a family off the drudgery of the dole.

There are plenty of Aussies who need the skills you listed. Unlike the Yanks, we seem to get by OK without a two-tiered wage system which has one rate for the Mexicans without papers and another for real people.

Your proposal is morally and socially just plain wrong. By all means, offer people training and work, but what's this about offering to pay only 15% of a wage?

No way. It is just not on.

Please don't come back whingeing that you might have been insulted or that someone is making fun of you. There is nothing funny in your idea at all - and despite your affirmation to the contrary, your idea would force real Australians who work on farms and with their hands out of work.

I'm not anti-refugee. I wife and her parents arrived here after spending years in a refugee camp. Father-in-law, trained as a commercial clerk and an accomplished poet worked as a labourer, a truckdriver and on a fork lift. He did what was available, but he had the same rights as the kid next door to a fair day's pay when it was due. Your two posts offend me deeply and, unlike you perhaps, I really do know what I am speaking about.

Refugees are no less human than Australian-born. Full stop.