The South Australian Road Transport Association (SARTA) says it welcomes the huge changes announced by the South Australian government yesterday to its heavy vehicle driver licence requirements.
SARTA participated in a joint media conference with SA transport minister Tom Koutsantonis and the widow of truck driver Slim, who sadly lost his life on the road this year, in Delphine Mugridge, to reveal the changes.
The two key changes involve SA no longer recognising overseas heavy vehicle driver experience, except for in New Zealand, requiring overseas drivers to undergo full training and assessments before gaining a MC licence, and launching a three-year pilot run by SARTA to progress HC drivers to an MC licence.
Instead of just holding, and not using, the HC licence for 12 months before transitioning to a MC licence, there’s now an alternative option to ensure better-trained and competent drivers that involves on-the-job buddy training within their employer’s operations.
Heavy Rigid (HR) licence holders will be required to complete a minimum of 60 hours of logged supervised driving and additional learning components. Drivers with a Heavy Combination (HC) licence will need to complete at least 50 hours of logged supervised driving with additional learning components.
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“These are minimum periods – some drivers will require 80 or 100 or more hours of training before they achieve the necessary competency,” SARTA executive officer Steve Shearer says.
“They’ll all have to undergo at least the above minimum hours of in-truck logged training on the job with the employer under the guidance of an experienced supervising driver, who is sitting right next to them the whole time doing real work.”
When and only when, the driver is considered ready, they will then have to undergo a practical driving assessment in a MC vehicle with an Authorised Examiner to obtain the MC licence. If they don’t pass the MC Licence assessment, they won’t get an MC licence.
“SARTA has pushed for changes to the licencing of HV drivers from overseas for some 15 years, but we were always met with arguments from officials that nothing can be done because of the 1939 Geneva Convention on Land Transport, under the control of the Dept for Foreign Affairs, which allows overseas drivers to use their overseas licences here,” Shearer says.
“As usual, SARTA did not give up and we kept pushing the issue at every opportunity within SA and nationally. In recent years, the changing dynamic on the roads has increased the need and the pressure for change.
“We have been discussing this with Minister Koutsantonis for a while and working with him and the Department on how to address it, especially given the Geneva Convention.”
The triple fatality tragedy on April 4, and the highly successful petition run by Delphine Mugridge (she now has 19,602 signatures), has provided added momentum.
“Minister Koutsantonis and the SA government have stepped forward and decided not to wait any longer for a ‘national solution’ and that SA would be the first state to take positive and effective action,” Shearer says.
“We hope these initiatives will also be adopted interstate. SARTA will be working within the industry nationally, just as Minister Koutsantonis works with his interstate counterparts, to make that happen.
“As we said on April 5, the loss of three truck drivers in the head-on truck-truck crash west of Yalata was another tragic loss of life and we extend our sincere condolences to the families of those drivers and their friends and associates. Today’s important changes might give them some solace that the deaths of their family members have provided some positive reform.”
Shearer says any fatality on our roads is one too many.
“For our industry, it’s worse when our people are involved and worse still when its only trucks that are involved,” he says.
“More often than not, it’s a case of truck-car or other road user and typically over 80 per cent of those crashes are caused by the driver of the other vehicle, according to repeated government studies. When it’s a truck-only crash, that means the industry has failed and lives have been lost.
“The great tragedy is that whilst the number and frequency of HV crashes has dropped consistently over the past 25 years, with a few blips along the way, we are still having too many crashes. The vast bulk of the industry and the businesses and drivers in it operate safely and responsibly, shun risk-taking and manage their safety through effective systems, management and training.
“In the end however, humans are involved and occasionally some humans make bad decisions or errors of judgement that cause a crash. In other instances, some, a small minority, drive as if the road is their own, without due care and respect for all the other professional and community drivers out there. That attitude, which is not limited to any particular nationality of driver, must end and managers must stamp it out.”
Shearer says he knows that the authorities understand the current extended downtime of the rail of Perth due to flood damage, meaning there are many more trucks on the Eyre Highway and that most of the extra rigs and drivers are from interstate and are unfamiliar with the route.
“The exorbitant rates being thrown around by rail-freight operators and customers who are desperate to get their freight to Perth doesn’t help,” Shearer says.
“We will all have to await the findings of the crash investigation, but if anything good is to come out of this triple fatality, it must be the widespread and rock-solid reinforcement of the absolute need for everyone within trucking business, from the drivers right back to the owners and MD and boards of large corporates, to ensure they have genuine and effective safety measures, systems and training in place to ensure safety.
“That must include measures to remove all pressure on drivers, logistics managers and others and if need be, replace any who refuse to operate safely.
“We can’t change the geography or shorten the distance between Adelaide and Perth, or anywhere else, so there is absolutely no point in bending it like Beckham. The journey is what it is and if every driver and operator did what the vast majority do and operated completely safely and responsibly, sharing the road safely, avoiding unnecessary overtaking or speeding and accepting a responsibility of care for all other road users, then we just might see heavy vehicle crashes become a rarity.”
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