Page 4243 - Week 11 - Thursday, 17 Sept 2009
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The former National Road Transport Commission was established to give effect to the agreements. The commission was replaced by the National Transport Commission in 2003. The important part of the National Road Transport Commission’s role was to establish a uniform and consistent regularity environment for road transport across the whole nation. The dangerous goods industry is, of course, a national one.
This bill is one of an increasing number of national uniform legislative measures which are to be implemented by each of the states and territories. One of the challenges in such an approach to national legislation is differing approaches in the jurisdictions to matters such as criminal law policy and, in the case of the ACT, that it has a Human Rights Act. This inevitably means there must be some differences between jurisdictions as to how uniform legislation is enacted. However, the key thing is to ensure that the core of the uniform scheme is enacted. To do otherwise obviously negates the significant economic benefits to Australia that would otherwise flow from the uniform scheme. Economic benefits come in many guises, but include reduction in conflicting regularity requirements and the obvious cost-benefits in price to the transport industry.
The first approach to reforming the laws relating to the road transport of dangerous goods was template legislation. The purpose of the legislation was to help the industry operate like one, unencumbered by different jurisdictional requirements that stifle efficiency and productivity and potentially compromise safety and the environment. Under the template approach, legislation was enacted by the commonwealth for operation in the Australian Capital Territory. The intention then was that legislation was to be adopted unchanged by each of the states and the Northern Territory, thus establishing national uniformity. Then, as the template was amended, the law of other jurisdictions would change automatically. However, as I have adverted to above, this approach to the legislation makes little allowance for local differences that do not undermine the integrity of the national scheme.
The template legislation of the Road Transport Reform (Dangerous Goods) Act 1995 of the commonwealth, as was noted in the presentation speech of this bill, is to be repealed by the commonwealth. While the ACT will be the last jurisdiction to update its laws in relation to road carriage of dangerous goods, it has not been practicable for the territory to act in advance of the commonwealth. This is because a commonwealth law overrides an inconsistent territory law. Were this to be enacted and commence before the commonwealth act is repealed, there would two legislative schemes in operation, but the ACT scheme only to the extent that it was not inconsistent with the commonwealth act and the regulations under the commonwealth act.
Consequently, the commencement of the repeal of the commonwealth act and this bill, when it is enacted, will be coordinated at officer level to ensure that these actions effectively happen at the same time to ensure that there is both no overlap between the two sets of legislation and, perhaps more importantly, no gap in the operation of legislation relating to the carriage of dangerous goods by road.
The bill before the Assembly, rather than being template legislation, is based on model legislation which allows for some jurisdictional differences in its
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