Q&A: Stuart St Clair, ATA

Nine years is a long time in any industry, but in Australia's rapidly evolving trucking industry it's an age. That's how long Stuart St Clair has served as Chief Executive for the peak representative body for Australia's truck industry, the Australian Trucking Association.

It's been a long and varied road for St Clair, whose time at the ATA was preceded by many years in the timber industry. It was after establishing his own sawmill in 1984 in the town of Guyra in NSW's New England region that St Clair developed his love of trucking, as he carted felled trees to his mill and carried processed timber to buyers in Sydney and Brisbane.

An interest in the town's future direction and a desire to effect change saw St Clair elected as councillor for Guyra Shire Council in 1987 and then Mayor in 1991.

With Guyra having a major truck stop on the New England Highway, it was there that St Clair first began his association with the fledgling Australian Trucking Association, which was first established as the Road Transport Forum in 1989.

St Clair's political aspirations took him all the way to Canberra when, in 1998, he was elected to the House of Representatives as the Member for New England.

However, a lesson in the fickle nature of politics saw St Clair suffer a bruising defeat three years later, which in turn led him to his next challenge: the role of Senior Advisor to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Development, John Anderson.

Continuing his association with the ATA, St Clair assisted Anderson with the formulation of heavy vehicle policy for a number of years before being invited to assume the role of ATA Chief Executive in March 2006.

Renowned for his direct, no-nonsense approach and can-do attitude, it's been a rollercoaster ride for the man who, as a wide-eyed teenager, took his first job in a Sydney sawmill in 1967.

After nine years as ATA Chief Executive, St Clair will formally step down from the role on Saturday, March 21, at the ATA's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner in Hobart.

Ahead of that historic occasion, trucksales.com.au caught up with St Clair and asked him to reflect on his time with the ATA – and of what lies ahead for a man who's just as comfortable behind the wheel of a road train in the outback, as he is behind a desk in Canberra.

trucksales.com.au: Stuart, what's been your biggest accomplishment at the ATA?

Stuart St Clair: I think it's to put together the best team. If you have the right team you can achieve anything. When our staff put their feet on the floor in the morning they actually want to come to work. And when people want to come to work the performance levels are fantastic.

They're employed here because they're keen, they're eager, they're smart, they're intelligent and they're humble, but most of all because they're independent thinkers. And that means that in the areas of policy and across a whole range of things, they're prepared to argue, fearlessly, to achieve a better result.

Out of that comes a great deal of good results. Do we win everything? No, we don't. Is a lot of what we do sexy? No, it's not – a lot of it's boring as bat shit. Imagine arguing with the Australian Taxation Office over the individual uses of fuel consumption to do with sleeper-cab auxiliary air-conditioning units…

It's not sexy but it's important – because it's all those little things that put a burden on the trucking industry, and that's where we need to be vigilant.

TS: What major legislative wins stand out?

SSC: One would have to be the recognition by the National Transport Commission that the industry is being overcharged. It took us six or seven years of trying to prove through data and evidence that the industry was being overcharged because of the way trucks were counted. It may sound simple but to the bureaucracy it was extraordinarily difficult to get to a belief – or at least an understanding – that that was correct.

Last year we got that. It meant that we went to the Federal Government and said, 'We're being overcharged; we don't think you should increase the road user charge and we think you should leave it stable until we start to catch up', and they did.

Did the states do that? No, they said 'Stick it up your jumper' and raised the price of regos. But that's life. Is it a big, sexy thing to achieve? No, but boy oh boy it makes a big difference.

Also, if it wasn't for the work of the ATA and its member associations we wouldn't have had, in my view, the improvements to the safety culture that we've had.

Then there are the taxation issues we've been able to win – the fact that off-road fuel pricing has been organised to protect some operators who run agitators on trucks or extra air-conditioning, and little wins like the removal of mandatory spray suppression gear on interstate-registered B-doubles.

There were amendments to the law to ensure drivers don’t have to carry NHVAS mass and maintenance paperwork in their cabs and we pushed really hard to wind up the heavy vehicle charging and investment reform process.

Things like lobbying the Senate to pass the bill that protects trucking businesses from the side effects of the re-introduction of fuel tax indexation – it's the little stuff. If we hadn't found that – if Bill McKinley [ATA head of Policy and Government Relations] hadn't found those sorts of things and lobbied to have them changed – we'd be paying more.

Pardon me, but there's a shitload to what we do. But I'm a seal, you know? I throw the ball in the air and I catch it on my nose. It's the hard work done by my staff – that's what works.

TS: Conversely, under your guidance what has been the ATA's biggest failure?

SSC: I think one of the largest concerns – and this will upset some people – is that we haven't succeeded as we should have in getting governments to understand the importance of the road freight task. I think that I've failed in that regard, and that goes all the way down the line.

I think partially it's because our industry is its own worst enemy. We've got people in our own industry who purport to support it but who tear it down publicly; they do that in trade magazines and in all sorts of things, they do it on television. Television is not about delivering the news or the facts, it's just about sensational stuff – it's always a truck that killed someone.

If you look at some of the wins and failures some of them cancel out, but I know we could have done better. But we now have a really effective Board, we have our subsidiaries, we have our safety accreditation business and we've got our SafetyTruck – there is a whole range of things to provide a great deal of interest.

That’s why I'm excited about [incoming ATA Chief Executive] Chris Melham. With the Board the way it is and with his staff, Chris will take the ATA to another level.

You're only measured by what you leave – you never look for the hole in the bucket of water when you take your hand out, let me tell you. And it's a very quick transition from rooster to feather duster. I learned that when I got booted out of parliament – the phone stops ringing instantly!

TS: You still enjoy time behind the wheel. How important has that been in carrying out your role?

SSC: I've always maintained my driving and I'm very proud of that. My Board has supported me in continuing to drive heavy vehicles. I've been all around Australia driving with people in semi-trailers, holding meetings with communities and councils. I'm an accredited triple road train driver – in fact I completed my last run to Darwin with Simon's [Simon National Carriers] last November.

I love it; it brings me back to who's on the road and it gives me a very grounded and up-to-date understanding of what's happening. And the beauty of it is nobody really knows who I am on the road, so people open up to you.

It was good to sit with bureaucrats and politicians sometimes and tell them how things happen on the road. It gives you a degree of credibility that I think is important. I'm not saying all CEOs should do it, but it was something I was keen on doing because I love trucks.

TS: What are the greatest challenges currently facing the industry?

SSC: It's the public perception of the truck driver – that's the hardest one. It's the perception that's put out there by well-meaning people who simply get it wrong.

It's also working with all sectors of your industry – employers, employees, associations, governments, media, the trade union movement, safety people, the whole thing – to try and head in a direction that delivers a safer, more professional and viable industry, without personal agendas becoming a focus. That's a real challenge.

The industry has only succeeded in its lobbying when it has one message delivered by many voices. The fact is that often it hasn't been 'one message delivered by many voices', it's been 'many messages delivered by many voices'.

I think we are as much at fault as anybody else, and we need to make sure we're talking to the media to ensure we're delivering a message that is at least consistent.

TS: What are the key takeaways with which you're leaving the job?

SSC: I think the importance of the one message with many voices is the primary thing I'll take away from here as a lobbyist. I mean that's what we do, but you're not going to please all the people all the time and you will encounter conflicting agendas.

We've adopted a philosophy that says the freight task of moving one container off the wharf at Botany Bay to go to Wetherill Park is no more or less important that moving six decks of cattle out of the Tanami Desert to Darwin for export. Everything in between – the city pie carts, the road trains, the minerals, the ore, the livestock operations, the couriers – all have a role to play in moving freight in Australia.

We need to stay on a national approach so we can break down some of these interstate challenges, while also knowing that only a third of the freight runs interstate and that the balance runs intrastate, of which the majority runs around the cities.

It's a very complex industry because it has so many variables. You know, 74 per cent of the industry has just one truck. Linfox and Toll and all the rest of them probably only move about 11 per cent of the freight on their own trucks. The balance is done by subbies, and some of those subbies are big subbies with hundreds of trucks.

So it's such a diverse grouping of big business and small business, that in ensuring the ATA provides lobbying for all sectors of industry sometimes we're at odds with the big end of town, and sometimes we're at odds with the small end of town – and we get belted by both. That's a fact of life.

So you have to have a balance, and that's where the ATA has to have a cross-section of experienced and knowledgeable people in certain areas.

TS: How has trucking changed over the last nine years?

SSC: Technology is changing rapidly and that's good. I'm a great believer in technology. I think trucks today are far easier to operate and they handle better, and then there's the safety technology – antilock braking, disc braking, electronic braking, rollover mitigation…

I mean, to drive a road train today compared to what they were like 10 years ago – give me today's trucks any time.

TS: And in politics?

SSC: We've seen a change in politics. We've got far greater instability in our federal parliamentary processes than we've had for many years.

I think we've had to develop better evidence-based submissions, and we've been able to do that because the Board has provided us with the resources to do that, which means our submissions have more weight.

We've been blessed to have transport ministers in all governments I've been dealing with who are prepared to listen and give you their time. Both [Warren] Truss and [Anthony] Albanese have been good to us.

But these hung parliaments being held to ransom all the time, by the Greens in particular who have no interest in trucks… They don't realise they've got to eat.

It is challenging as more of these fringe groups take control of the Senate, as it makes it exceptionally difficult for governments of either persuasion to deliver.

That just means you have to change the way you do your politics, I suppose. We've got to deal with them, we've got to ensure that we keep those cross-benchers up to date on our evidence-based policies and what we want to see governments do.

TS: So what's next for Stuart St Clair?

SSC: My wife and I are moving to WA. We've got a couple of girls over there that are at that age where they're starting to think about babies, and I think they need Grandma back. Grandma's been over here; we've got six kids between us. She's a Busselton girl and we've got a house waiting for us there that we bought last year.

[After the ATA Trucking Australia conference in Hobart] we're going to have four days around Tassie and then we're going to catch the ferry and have a lovely drive back around the Great Ocean Road, through the Barossa and Clare Valleys then back over the paddock and home. Then we'll sit and take a breather for a minute.

TS: Will we still see you behind the wheel of a big rig?

SSC: While I can, I'll never stop that, otherwise you lose your confidence. But I'm lucky: I can get a job on the floor at Bunnings; I can get a job being a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company; I can drive a road train; or I can fish. Whatever – as long as you love and enjoy what you do, that's all that counts.

There have been plenty of rumours – the transport industry is a wonderful gossiper – so I'm simply going to say very clearly: I have no idea what I'm going to do. And you know what? I don't care. Because it will be something – something will pop up.

Stuart St Clair will hand over the reins to incoming ATA CEO Chris Melham on Saturday, March 21.