Opinion: EWDs – opportunity lost?

If there is one undeniable fact about Australia's road transport industry it is its inability to speak with one voice.

Okay, we came close with the road tax insurrection when blockades slowed the movement of freight across Australia to a trickle, remembered through the iconography of Razorback. The road transport industry showed its sheer power to affect all Australians. Despite several attempts, the industry has never been able to successfully repeat that action.

We all know industry is made up of many essential elements along the service chain. Drivers, owner-drivers, small business fleets, sub-contractor fleets, major corporate freight forwarders, the legislature, regulators, compliance agencies, enforcers... and associations.

Politicians and bureaucrats would like nothing more than a nice umbrella organisation representing an industry. A small group of professionals to speak to. A representative voice that understands bureaucratese and represents everybody from a tyre fitter in Port Hedland to a 40th-floor Chief Executive in Sydney.

We all know that ain't gunna happen.

But take one issue: the introduction of Electronic Work Diaries. What should perhaps be a technological revolution is instead a half-hearted mooching around the country with association voices mumbling weasel words of support without doing much at all.

Many owner drivers are against the idea because all have been stung by over-zealous enforcement and many say they will cost too much to fit. The electronic diary will measure time by the second and many operators view the current culture of compliance and enforcement as a threat that could break their business.

Movers and shakers, including various transport ministers, swirling 12-year-old scotch over artisan ice cubes in the dimmed light of plush Canberra bars, talk of the increase of costs and the weekly grocery trolley bill if the letter of the law is enforced. Not electorally viable.

The stupidity of the entire EWD issue is that the majority of long-haul trucks already carry the technology – and more. The technology is being used daily by fleets as a management and risk abatement tool.

It's a shame that many of the bureaucracies live in some parallel universe.

In my opinion, the potential introduction of Electronic Work Diaries offers the industry a huge opportunity to rewrite the book on compliance and enforcement, bringing legislation in line with the best driving practices rather than jamming driving hours into a one-size-fits-all, off-the-rack mish-mash of vehicle legislation that's highest achievement is to nurture the most dangerous workplace in Australia.

If the industry and bureaucracies were fair dinkum about it, mechanical recording devices could have been introduced 30 years ago. The 100mph trucks and the bloody death toll of the old Hume could have been stopped overnight. But there has never been the political or industrial will to legislate tachographs and the subsequent electronic versions that have been available all this century.

As a driver who has filled many log books, I've experienced the 'versatility' that the manual logging of driving hours gave to the industry. How else could Queensland fruit, under canvas, get to Melbourne and Adelaide markets in fresh condition?

Industry and government never had the guts to speak the truth. So that Melbourne mums could put fresh bananas in Johnny's lunch box at an affordable price, drivers had to work long, hard, illegal hours and suffer sleep deprivation. Fact of life. I was there.

Instead there was a politico-industrial whitewash of the whole affair. Accurate recording was the last thing most politicians and industry leaders wanted. To keep truck operation within the rules would have cost industry heavily.

Today the situation on the road has improved significantly. Road transport companies have been monitoring drivers' behaviour for years and tracking their trucks across the map of Australia. But safety is being driven by the management of freight companies themselves helped along by the big stick of Chain of Responsibility legislation.

Unbelievably, the industrial/political cabal still falters about the introduction of a mature technology that tells the truth.

The flawed analogue system of work diaries is being transferred lock stock and smoking barrel into the digital monitoring realm. Archaic rules of compliance and enforcement aren't taking the opportunity offered by change.

The potential of EWDs offers the industry a truth-based system to rewrite the book. Research could be carried out so that evidence-based driving regimes can be introduced.

We have been going on for years about the physical and emotional differences between drivers and how different individuals require different rest patterns at different times. How difficult would it be for the EWD to start clocking a driver's time as he or she tags on and starts the engine? Drive for two hours and pull up for five minutes to relieve yourself and count the tyres. Shut the engine down for that five minutes, save fuel and the EWD counts it as rest time.

Continue through the day. No filling in log books, just a driving regime to meet the driver's needs. In a five- or six-hour stint, the odds are the driver will have clocked up the required rest times as needed rather than at proscribed times. If, at the end of a five- or six-hour stint, the EWD notes rest time does not meet the legal minimum, the driver is forewarned with a suggested suitable rest period.

With a flexible structure designed to sit within current driving hours but with flexible, accumulative rest times, it is not hard to imagine a system that monitors driving hours required in the eastern states with the flexibility of the Western Australian system.

But this needs science, and industry research. The entire culture of adversarial enforcement needs to be the subject of a major judicial inquiry. Why not, at a time chosen to introduce Electronic Work Diaries, look at the entire canvas of driving protocols? Maybe the truck drivers' workplace and the roads of Australia could be made safer.