It is only natural that with a spotlight on domestic fuel supply and price, people are shining a light on the alternatives. And the default conversation in the weeks since war broke out has tended to be about electric trucks.
Whilst this is understandable, too much emphasis on a single solution risks missing some of the easy wins available to the industry right now. Enter the Productivity Commission’s (PC) Impacts of Heavy Vehicle Reform Interim Report published last week.
The PC needs to be congratulated. The interim report highlights that trucking productivity has fallen to zero and strongly calls for a step-change in regulatory reform given how vital heavy vehicles are to Australia’s “ports, farms, factories, distribution centres, shops and homes”.
The report is the missing piece in a decade of advocacy on these issues. The Productivity Commission pointedly outlines that the largest productivity increase (up to $4 billion worth) can be unlocked by increasing road access to high-productivity vehicles. Hooray!
The PC calls out vehicle design, advancing technology, automating access, heavy zero-emission vehicles and telematics as all opportunities to re-start growth and then bemoans the fact that “the safest, most-productive and lowest-emission heavy vehicles face more barriers to get on the road than a standard prescriptive heavy vehicle.” I’ll cheers to that criticism being called out!
The Commission will now seek additional consultation before submitting its final report to Government, but clearly the message is sinking in, as evidenced by one of the Level 2 temporary actions of the National Fuel Security Plan, which is for jurisdictions to consider regulatory reforms to improve freight efficiency (e.g. longer trailers, trucks able to deliver later hours).
These temporary emergency measures need to be turned into a systemised, consistent, meaningful and permanent policy response to increase the uptake of higher productivity vehicles and automating road access, in an immediate, cost effective, and fair process that unlocks productivity.
A national freight task needs a national policy response. Here are the 10 holistic ways, governments can unlock productivity, improve safety, and increase the uptake of new heavy zero-emission vehicles (HZEVs):
- Financially incentivise new HZEVs in a broad-based mechanism that bridges the total cost of ownership gap for all of industry.
- Provide a clear roadmap on publicly accessible infrastructure, including a package of incentives like peppercorn leases, and sharing data on electricity grid network capacity along key national freight corridors to better inform charging infrastructure decisions.
- Remove the regulatory barriers and improve the consistency across the network for HZEVs, including axle weights.
- Look at low-cost ways to increase the adoption of HZEVs, such as removing curfews in metropolitan areas where it makes sense to do so (just like during COVID).
- Expedite the production of low-carbon liquid fuels (LCLF) and work with the fuel suppliers and truck OEMs on quality, standards and price point to incentivise adoption for the hardest-to-abate sector of the market.
- Legislate for road managers to consider productivity when assessing an access permit application and to reduce the burden of the Performance Based Standards (PBS) system.
- Fast track the National Automatic Access System (NAAS), ensuring access outcomes are delivered.
- Periodically review General Access Vehicle requirements to ensure mass and dimension limits keep pace with technological advancement.
- End the silo approach to the data held in key government agencies to better track and understand heavy vehicles from first manufacture to end of life.
- And incentivise – as opposed to penalise – the operators and vehicle manufacturers who seek to increase productivity through vehicle design and the uptake of higher-productivity vehicles compared to the prescriptive fleet.
The Productivity Commission interim report is a must read. It has provided the rationale and options for improving productivity in a way that does not increase inflation. So, as Government is preparing its Budget, it has been given the tools for reform. Now all we need is action!