The transport industry is grinding to a halt due to the ALP's National system, several years delayed in being introduced, but within 2 weeks causing the trucking industry to grind to a halt. How anyone could vote for those clowns is beyond me.
LOREE Rudd remembers her brother Kevin sitting dreamily in the cow shed while the rest of the family tackled the more mundane chores of animal husbandry. “He preferred to design castles out of the cow feed,” Loree once told essayist David Marr.
Was it possible, even then, that the young romancer destined to be our 26th prime minister was working on an early version of the Seamless National Economy Agenda?
An improvised fortress constructed from stockfeed that collapses under the slightest pressure is an apt metaphor for the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, a late-developing legacy of Rudd’s dream of coast-to-coast harmonisation.
The NHVR will save the economy $1.5 billion or $2.4bn a year, depending on which of Anthony Albanese’s press releases you pick. It would take truck regulation away from the Mensa-challenged mutton-heads assumed to be in charge of the states and hand it to an omni-benevolent commonwealth bureaucracy.
Albanese was tweeting like a clucky dad two weeks ago when the NHVR opened for business. “After years of confusion and costly red tape, all trucks, buses and other vehicles weighing more than 4.5 tonnes come under the new Heavy Vehicle National Law,” he wrote in a press release.
Sadly, however, the launch of the national truck regulator - 13 months behind schedule - has been a colossal disaster, as Albanese could have predicted if he had had his ear to the ground.
The transport of oversized and overmassed (OSOM) loads has been virtually frozen. The mining and construction industries have been hit particularly badly. Operators, drivers and contractors are seething. The streamlined, seamless, one-stop shop is a lemon.
