This year’s Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association Conference took place in Toowoomba, as a jointly hosted event with the Livestock and Rural Transporters Association of Queensland.

The ALRTA conference took place in the Goods Shed event venue in Toowoomba, in a region which is home to the largest cattle feedlots in the southern hemisphere, with 617,000 cattle on feed in the local region and 45 per cent of the Australian beef herd are on the Darling Downs. These cattle make up over 65 per cent of Australia’s beef herd.

“It’s an interesting time for transport and regional transport, at the moment,” said Rachel Smith, Executive Director of the ALRTA, at the event.

“We’ve got a very interesting federal government that perhaps doesn’t necessarily look beyond the metropolitan borders. We’ve seen a lot of progress in urban settings, in the policy setting, but not a lot around the regional and rural economies.

“This is the situation we’re going to have to play to over the next 12 months, leading into the federal election. We are concentrating on the contribution that rural transport makes to regional economies and jobs, and stressing the need to adequately fund roads to provide safe workplaces for everyone in the rural transport sector.”

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This national conference was the first opportunity for Mat Munro, the CEO of the Australian Trucking Association, to return to national conference of the ALRTA of which he was Executive Director for over ten years.

“It’s really nice to be back and good to see a lot of familiar faces and be amongst you today,” opened Mat.

“The ATA is working on plenty of big ticket items, as the peak body representing 10 different member organisations. This is really broad mandate, but the first one I would mention is the industrial relations reforms.

“I was with ALRTA when we tore the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal down the first time and, now, we’ve got something like it back. It’s a little bit different, but it’s also a little bit the same. It carries some of the same risks.

“We’ve worked really closely with our member organisations, it was a tricky issue for us, because across our 10 member organisations, we had five that were supportive of it and five that really didn’t want it to come back in any form at all.

“We worked with our members and with the government to try to find a way to bring this to function in a way that would actually work. The legislation has passed and we asked government for a whole range of failsafes, so that it can’t do what it did last time. If it gets it wrong, we can stop it. Rather than, what we had to do last time, drive the trucks up the Parliament House and protest on the lawns to get rid of it.

“I’m hoping we’ve got plenty of other mechanisms to deal with issues this time around. We’ve got automatic understandings for industry associations be part of the consultations. We’ve got very long lead times before anything actually comes into effect, so we can analyse it and see where it’s actually going to have problems.”