Every two years, when the Brisbane Truck Show comes around, it is not being a truck enthusiast or the trucking industry veteran aspect which comes to mind for me, it is much more about being part of the community.
There is something very different about the trucking industry, and the people and industries around it, which differentiates it very clearly from other pillars of the economy. While they may be equally as important as the trucking industry, they do not have anything like the same sense of community around what we regard as ‘our’ industry.
We speak a common language, we accept quite different types of character than those which could survive at high levels in many other industries. Also, unlike many major industries in Australia and although there are some big players in the game, the industry is not dominated by those large corporate operations.
The vast majority, and the core of the trucking industry, are relatively small, often regionally based, often family owned, companies, which are not just small mum and dad operations somewhere out in the bush.
They are serious, large businesses run across a large number of depots nationally, but while still retaining that personal community feel both within the organisations themselves, but also exhibit the feeling of sharing values alongside other similar operations across the country who suffer from similar issues and often come up with very similar solutions to the never ending problems of running a trucking operation in difficult conditions in a vast country, like ours.
At the end of the day, all of these different factors feed into the fact that we as a trucking community feel exactly that, as a community, we talk to each other as a community. We all share a common bond which is often imperceptible to outsiders and also, in some cases, impenetrable to outsiders. However it is great to be part of such a strong and welcoming community.
Of course, when a community like this develops, there are some downsides to the way that this sort of collective works, we are very inward facing, which means that for many people in the industry getting their point across and out into wider society is firstly, not a priority, and secondly, very difficult to achieve.
People within the trucking community are very adept at communicating with each other and other people with whom they deal on a regular basis. However, presenting what goes on in the trucking community to those totally unfamiliar with, and outside any experience of the industry, can be very difficult.
It is quite difficult to be within the trucking world and maintain enough distance from it to properly get points across out into the general community which align with the feelings within trucking itself.
There is a need for members of this trucking community to get their heads up and look at our world from the point of view of someone outside of the trucking sphere, in order to be able to get our point across to the wider society.
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