Government at a Snail’s Pace

We know the wheels of government turn exceedingly slow, but the Heavy Vehicle National Law process must be one of those which takes the biscuit, it’s government at a snail’s pace.

Over 20 years ago the process began to develop a national organisation to oversee regulation of the trucking industry across the country, in every state. This was a project which eventually became the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator.

In order to get this organisation into existence and within the law, there had to be an Australian first, one single Heavy Vehicle National Law. This did come to pass, eventually being passed in the Queensland Parliament, at the last minute, and adopted by some of the other states agreeing to abide by the rules of the Queensland law.

At the time, getting the original law onto the books had to be a rushed job. There had been delay after delay after delay, as you would expect, but a law did come into effect and the National heavy Vehicle Regulator did come into existence and did have a law which it could enforce.

Unfortunately, the process of developing the NHVR had many flaws and its first few months were a complete disaster. Then when the NHVR calmed down and actually started to work in a more effective manner, those enforcing the regulations realised that the HVNL, which had been rushed through the Queensland Parliament a few years before, was not up to scratch and needed to be completely rethought.

A rational person, at this point, would think that this need to fix the problem would have been very urgent. In fact, the process of developing a new HVNL took years, with long ongoing consultations among people in industry plus all of the state jurisdictions who were involved, plus many others.

Yet again, a rational person would expect that having done so much consultation and having been made aware of what the issues were in the HVNL to begin with, this process would come up with a new set of rules which everybody involved in the consultations could live with. 

As we now know, it turned out that the HVNL, which the National Transport Commission came up with, was dead in the water virtually before it appeared and the consequent rejection of that law lead to the Kanofski review of the whole process, which, yet again, took a long time.

When that review came out, most parties appeared to agree that the review made useful points which could be used in the development of a new HVNL. 

Now several years later there are ongoing discussions going on in the background and teams developing an HVNL for the regulation of the trucking industry.

We are now many many years after the problem had been identified. We are still having to deal with a basic law which is unfit for purpose and a system of change which is so distressingly glacial that the only reason there are there is freight moving on our roads, in an efficient manner, is because the road freight industry has been so badly treated by its regulators and by its lawmakers for so long that it has become resilient enough to be able to survive despite the total incompetence of those tasked with the job of creating a legislative framework, in which the trucking industry can work safely and efficiently.