Looking at what else is in this week’s Diesel News, it would seem that there are major changes needed in the trucking industry and road transport and the government need to be ready to introduce changes in order to meet the challenges of the ever-growing freight task which faces us.
One of the concerns raise this week is about the effect of the introduction of electric vehicles on the way revenue is raised from the trucking industry in the future. Electric trucks do not pull into their local service station and fill up with diesel. There is no excise payable for trucks pulling up and charging up at the nearest power socket.
The Road User Charge is due for a major shakeup anyway, but the expected increase in electric powered vehicles over the next 10 years means that something like mass, distance, location charging is pretty much inevitable.
There are also some damning results in the report following research into the levels of gender inequality across Australia industry and, more specifically, in the transport sector. Even within the transport sector, road transport has a quite woeful performance.
Not only are there very few women working in our industry, but we don’t pay them very well. This is not a good result at a time when the industry is short of younger people coming into the industry to enable trucking to cope with the demographic time bomb which sees the average age of truck drivers creep closer and closer to 60 every year.
The problem is a double whammy, not only are we not attracting women into our workforce, but when we do we don’t pay them very much. There is a great need to change this particular aspect of the trucking industry. Trucking desperately needs keen young people to take it into the future and 50 per cent of those people who could possibly work in our industry will be put off by low wage levels and a clear lack of the correct culture to attract female employees.
In this week’s video we are highlighting another major need to change. There are not enough people around you know how to handle a Roadranger to allow us to continue as we have in the past. The video does demonstrate, however, that the new technology which is coming on stream from just about every manufacturer will make it easier to introduce a wide variety of people into the trucking industry.
Every time we look at the issues which face the trucking industry it is clear there are major changes needed. There is often a discussion about how these changes could come about, suggestions about the direction which we need to take and well-meaning speeches made on the subject.
However, due to a number of factors, including our difficult to navigate federal and state government system, not much seems to get done. There also seems to be a large degree of resistance to change in some trucking operations.
There is going to come up point, quite soon, when resistance to change is going to become a luxury. There is a lot of stuff coming down the pike at the trucking industry and there will be no option, the major changes needed will have to be made and made quickly, so why not start now?
