Recent highlights include submissions to MBIE on health and safety and to the Commerce Commission on its Wholesale Supply Inquiry.

That second item may sound a bit dull but it is important as it will consider if extra regulation is needed to improve the wholesale supply of groceries. It was great to see that the road transport related activities are in scope as to how the grocery supply chain is managed.

 PPP is AOK

The government’s announcement this week that it is refreshing New Zealand’s Public Private Partnership (PPP) framework was more good news.

The framework provides a blueprint to the market outlining how the government will approach future PPP transactions. This is an important part of the government’s plan to deliver, maintain, fund, and finance infrastructure in smarter ways, and to attract international capital and expertise to New Zealand projects.

Even better was the news that the new PPP framework has backing from the Opposition.

This approach will help remedy the issue of the revenue gaps between forecast monies provided by traditional systems and the infrastructure investment needs. Having a bi-partisan government position provides greater certainty that projects can be delivered.

Another look at accidents

Our opinion was sought about whether TAIC, the Transport Accident Investigation Commission, should have its mandate extended to include incidents related to heavy vehicles.

TAIC takes a no-blame approach to investigations and its findings can’t be used for prosecutions.  It can also look at a cluster of events and consider whether systemic issues are a contributing factor.

The chance to benefit from these learnings and insights is a major gap in our current framework. That approach isn’t the role of the regulators and it’s a role that needs to be at arms-length from them because there is an inherent conflict of interest. For these reasons, we are strongly in favour of TAIC ‘s mandate being extended although we also argue it doesn’t need to wait for a major event to occur before starting to think about possible improvements.

Our views on the benefits TAIC could bring should not in any way be seen as being critical of NZTA or Police. NZTA plays a big part in making the rules, and managing the entry and exit of operators in the system. Similarly the Police, and particularly CVST, is focussed on compliance and taking enforcement action against non-compliance. These are key functions and activities that need to be in place and routinely undertaken.

However, the risk with that approach is that the link between some rules and the intended outcome of improved safety performance can sometimes be tenuous. Over the last year or so we’ve advocated for a shift from a strict compliance approach to a greater consideration of managing risk. We welcomed news this week that NZTA is up for a conversation about what that means.

 As Lindsay Calvi-Freeman and I made our way back from an industry meeting we hosted at Stratford with good support from NZTA, we popped in at the Ohakea weigh station.

The accuracy and integrity of equipment used for compliance-checking needs to be high and it was great to see Police CVST at Ohakea doing calibration checking of its mobile brake roller machine.

NZTA upgrades

The NZTA National Freight Forum was also held this week and I enjoyed the presentation on what NZTA is doing differently to make our roads better.

Factors such as using asphalt rather than chip seal, and incorporating drainage under the shoulder were two factors that appeared to be major construction changes.

NZTA is putting together more information on this which we will share directly with members. But I was left thinking that NZTA has really taken on-board that whatever was being done before hasn’t been working as well as it should, so it’s doing things differently to make that better. To me that’s a really good change with a huge upside for everyone.

NZTA has also been under stress from operators seeking variable CoF frequency.

That’s a good sign because it appears many operators have good systems in place enabling them to seek this concession. However the high demand is creating issues for NZTA so it’s working hard to remedy that and in the new year it should be better placed to make an announcement in that regard. In the meantime please be patient if you’re pursuing this path.

Overall it’s been great to see that lots of things have moved from being talked about to actually happening and that’s a hugely positive step for everyone.

– By Dom Kalasih, chief executive officer, Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand