For owner-drivers, ‘fitness to drive’ isn’t some abstract legal concept. It’s your body, your head, your bank balance and your truck all bound up in whether you feel safe enough to turn the key.
You know when you’re sore, exhausted, stressed or dealing with a health problem. You also know when the mortgage is due and the rate on that load won’t cover time off. Every day you’re juggling those two realities.
The law, however, is heading in a different direction. Under the Heavy Vehicle National Law, the way ‘fitness to drive’ is being framed increasingly appears to assume there’s a neat separation: a company that manages risk and a driver who turns up and drives. For owner-drivers, those two people are the same. You’re management, the worker, the operator and the driver. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Because in practice, when something goes wrong, the question becomes: what did you, as a business owner, do to protect you, the driver? It’s a strange conversation to have with yourself. But that’s where the road is heading.
Out on the highway today, three groups really touch this space. Police worry about road rules, drink and drug driving and anything that poses an immediate safety risk. NHVR inspectors focus on fatigue, work diaries, mass, maintenance and the chain of responsibility. Doctors sit in the background: they do your commercial medicals, they write the reports, they tick the boxes that let you hold a licence.
Neither police nor inspectors are doctors, and nobody pretends they are. But they already have the power to stop you in your tracks if they think you’re an immediate danger. If an officer believes you’re too fatigued or too impaired to continue, they can direct you to pull up and stay put. In terms of immediate safety, that’s perfectly reasonable. Nobody seriously argues a dangerously drowsy driver should be waved on to sort it out later.
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The concern is what happens next.
As ‘fitness to drive’ has been broadened to cover sleep apnea, diabetes, mental health, prescription medication and more, the line between genuine medical assessment and roadside impression has started to blur. It’s one thing to say, “You look exhausted, you’re not driving any further tonight”. It’s another thing entirely to say, “You look crook, here’s a massive fine and a black mark against your name”, all without a medical professional ever entering the picture.
Enforcement officers do receive training, but it’s aimed at understanding the law, gathering evidence and spotting obvious impairment. They learn how to apply fatigue rules, how to use approved breath and drug testing devices, and how to identify someone who is clearly unsafe to be behind the wheel. What they are not trained to do is diagnose complex medical conditions or untangle the side-effects of a cocktail of legal medications. They can see you’re unsteady or confused; they cannot tell whether that’s blood sugar, sleep apnea, heart trouble, a new antidepressant or simple exhaustion after weeks of financial and family stress.
Yet the more we stretch ‘fitness to drive’ into medical territory, the more power we place in the hands of people who are not medically qualified. That should worry every driver who depends on their licence to put food on the table.
Nobody is arguing that unfit drivers should be allowed to continue just because only a doctor can give a definitive view. If an inspector genuinely believes you’re unsafe to drive another kilometre, they should absolutely have the power and the duty to stop you right then and there. Immediate safety must come first.
But there’s a clear difference between an urgent safety decision and an officer who is unsure or overzealous and takes the ‘just in case’ approach or worse, where an argument develops and the officer decides to exert their power. If the system wants to go beyond parking the truck for a few hours, if it wants to impose eye-watering fines, trigger licensing action or effectively end a driver’s career, then that decision should rest on more than a hunch at the roadside.
We already accept this principle with drink and drug driving. An officer doesn’t just sniff the air and declare you over the limit. They use an approved, calibrated device. They rely on a recognised process. For more serious consequences, there is usually a confirmatory test. The idea is simple: if you’re going to hammer someone based on a technical or biological measure, you use proper tools and proper expertise.
Fitness-to-drive decisions on medical grounds should be treated the same way. If an officer suspects there is more going on than ordinary fatigue or a long day, if they think a health condition or medication is making you unsafe, that should trigger a medical process, not a roadside diagnosis. Park the truck if needed. Then arrange for the driver to be assessed by a doctor who understands commercial driving standards, send the report to the courts and make any big decisions with proper evidence on the table.
What we cannot afford is a system where a two-day enforcement course, a clipboard and a torch become stand-ins for a medical degree.
Owner-drivers sit in a uniquely vulnerable spot in all of this. You carry all the risk: of fatigue, of illness, of financial pressure. You answer for your own scheduling decisions, your own health choices, your own willingness to say no when a job isn’t realistically safe. You don’t have a safety department to hide behind. When an inspector climbs the steps to your cab, the ‘company’ and the ‘driver’ are the same person sitting in the same seat.
If the law is going to start issuing big penalties and grounding trucks on health and medical fitness, then a doctor must be part of the process, not an optional extra. Drivers and operators should not have to spend thousands of dollars in courts just to prove we were fit to work and keep our businesses alive. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
As the regime hardens, we should be insisting on a simple principle: roadside officers protect the here and now; medical professionals determine health and fitness. If the government wants to talk seriously about safety, it also has to talk seriously about fairness, due process and the basic idea that you shouldn’t be treated as guilty first and left to fight your way back to innocence later.
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