Trucks mobilise on tax

At the launch of the Australian Trucking Associations’s 2013 election campaign, chairman David Simon said the association was focusing on the carbon tax and its effect on the transport industry.

He said the Labor government planned to extend its carbon tax to fuel used by the trucking industry, and that trucking operators would pay almost seven cents a litre extra in fuel tax from July 1, 2014.

“The Labor government’s plan to extend its carbon tax to truck fuel would cause more small trucking businesses to close,” Mr Simon said.

“This would cost the industry more than half a billion dollars in the first year.

“Most trucking businesses do not have the market power to increase their freight rates to cover the cost of the tax and operate on very tight margins as it is.”

Mr Simon called on the Labor government to drop its plan to extend the carbon tax to truck fuel.

A spokesman for the federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Anthony Albanese described the carbon tax extension as “old news”.

He said the idea was originally discussed to level the transport industry playing field, to bring the trucking industry up to par with aviation, rail and shipping taxes.

“We decided to include heavy vehicles in the package to avoid distortion in the market place,” the spokesman said.

“None of this is new – we announced the package two years ago, and it’s not automatically going to apply because it will have to go through parliament first.

“Once fully implemented on July 1 2014, the effective carbon price will have only a marginal impact on fuel bills, less than the regular fluctuations in global oil prices, which in recent years has ranged from as low as $US40 a barrel to as high as $US130 a barrel.”

He also said agriculture, forestry and fishery industries would be permanently excluded and that trucks fuelled by CNG, LNG, LPG or biofuels would not pay the effective carbon price.

Livestock and Bulk Carriers Association (LBCA) president Barney Hayes said trucking businesses couldn’t switch to biodiesel like the government expected.

He said truck manufacturers didn’t recommend using fuel with more than five per cent biodiesel in their equipment, therefore the carbon tax created no incentive to move to this arrangement.

In addition, he said biodiesel would be subject to a carbon tax of 6.515 cents a litre, compared with the proposed carbon fuel tax of 6.868 cents a litre – a saving of only a third of a cent a litre.

“Trucking businesses cannot easily reduce their fuel consumption except through using higher

productivity vehicles (HPV),” he said,

“The biggest burden on regional trucking and the industries they service is lack of access on local roads for HPVs, primarily where livestock and grain businesses are located.”

Mr Hayes said regional trucking businesses operated on tight margins, with an average profitability in 2011-12 of 6.2 per cent (average for Australian industries was 10.2 per cent).

“Trucking is also a service industry meanings costs are passed on to our customers,” Mr Hayes said.

“Therefore, essentially this plan is a further tax on local regional industries with the flow-on effect impacting local communities through lost revenue, job cuts and reduced livelihood.”

Mr Hayes said with regional industries heavily reliant on road freight and transport being a large component of the cost structure of agricultural products, the tax would further weaken the competitiveness of Australian industries competing in local and global markets.

John Dietrich Livestock Transport owner John Dietrich, Junee, said on September 14, Australia needed to vote to get Labor out of power.

“All she’s (Gillard) doing is costing us a lot of money,” he said.