Historically, the relationship between the trucking industry and its regulators has been fraught with hostility.
This issue was exacerbated by the fact that, before the NHVR, each state had a different set of rules and regulations for the trucking industry, and the variations in rules between the states were considerable and petty, leading to vehicles being compliant in some states and non-compliant in others.
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The NHVR was created to improve the situation out on the road, but its first few months of existence were chaotic at best.
The CEO at the time resigned, the trucking industry was in uproar, the permit systems around Australia failed and the situation was much worse than it had been under the previous set of regimes.
The man who was called in to try and clean up the mess was Sal Petroccitto, who had been involved in the development of the NHVR when he was working for Transport and Main Roads in Queensland.
Sal faced a daunting task, as the project looked to be failing and an extremely angry trucking industry was struggling to cope with the pushback. This is not the sort of situation anyone would choose to face on their first day in the job, but that is the scene which Petrocitto faced on May 19, 2014.
10 years later, as Sal was facing his last days in the job, he recalled advice from the first NHVR Chairman he worked with, Bruce Baird: ‘Sal’, he said, ‘if you’re ever going to go, you go on a high’.
“An OAM last year, three consecutive customer service awards, transition program awards, an industry that now respects us, I think we are doing a pretty good job,” says Sal.
“I can remember my first couple of conferences where I went to make presentations and people were just standing there going bang, bang, bang with issues. Compare that to now, where I think we have clearly made a difference.”
Original concept
The trucking industry’s calls for consistent rules and enforcement across the country had a long history. Each state authority with responsibility for the trucking industry took a slightly different take on the rules.
B-doubles able to drive around in Queensland would get pinged when crossing into New South Wales for being over length because of the different parameters the roadside enforcement teams used to measure the front and rear of the vehicle. This was one of many, many examples of issues which disrupted business for the trucking industry, when it was travelling interstate.
There had been a long process of lobbying, on the part of the industry, to the National Transport Commission and the federal and state governments, to come up with some form of national regulation, looking for consistency in the rules the trucking industry had to obey, as it travelled from state to state.
This was a long and drawn out process which eventually led to the decision to create the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, which would enforce a Heavy Vehicle National Law on which all of the states should agree.
There followed a complicated process whereby the new HVNL was developed and passed into law in the Queensland State Parliament. At that point, both the Northern Territory and Western Australia decided that the process was not for them and stepped back from passing the law.
The remaining states did pass laws, using that basic Queensland law as a template, but several of them also added in their own sub-clauses, conditions and variations to the regulations in their particular state.
At the same time as this process was happening, the project of creating an agency, which would eventually be the NHVR, began. It was decided that the first part of the process for the agency would be taking over the permit system.
Once the NHVR went live in February 2014, the issues immediately began, with massive delays and mistakes in the issuing of permits. Complaints came in from around the country and the problem gained national news attention.
The causes of the issues were varied, depending on the speaker’s point of view. Some laid the blame at the feet of the state bureaucracy, sabotaging a process they did not want to happen.
A Nick Cater opinion piece in The Australian painted the NHVR development process as a disaster waiting to happen, with the state governments around Australia unable to stop it from happening.
While wanting to negotiate about the details, there was never any hesitation on the part of trucking in supporting the idea of the NHVR, but the permit chaos caused uproar.
Blame was allocated on the basis of your point of view. Many claimed the state authorities were sabotaging the process after the loss of their functions.
“With the NHVR coming into existence, who is threatened?” asked a PowerTorque opinion piece.
“The comfortable bureaucratic fiefdoms of the State Road Authorities, who have made the truckie’s life difficult for so many years, that’s who. These state authorities are also the people who know how to help any potential national regulator get the permitting system right from the word go.”
“The launch and the operation of the NHVR was always only going to be as good as the support that it received,” said Chris Melham, then CEO of NatRoad.
“Did the NHVR get the support it needs from jurisdictions during the planning phase? Was the volume of permit applications received by the NHVR in line with the projected workload expected?”
At that point, the principle of a single national law for road transport was at stake. Richard Hancock, who was the CEO during the process of building the NHVR, resigned under the pressure of the issues in May 2014.
During this fraught period, Sal Petroccitto was looking on from his position in Queensland’s Transport and Main Roads.
As the dysfunction played out, Queensland, then New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia took their permit functions back, but Tasmania stuck with the NHVR. After this, the first CEO had moved on. Sal was recruited as his replacement and started work on May 19.
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