In terms of industry representation, the 8 October 2021 press release from Transporting New Zealand, headed “Can someone steer the ship?” nicely sums up the events of the previous couple of weeks. The first line, “It’s starting to feel like we are on a rudderless ship drifting further and further away from the rest of the world,” fits perfectly.

The writer of that release seems unaware that the only way to drift in a ship is when you lose power to its engines. Rudders only set the direction and are useless unless there is forward or rearward momentum. That’s why you must look after the engines and the people who make them work. In the transport world, the engines are the industry associations, and they are broke and in need of a major overhaul. Changing the engineer’s name does not fix the fundamental cause of the engines failing to provide the necessary momentum.

As already noted by New Zealand Trucking’s Dave McCoid, on the eve of Tony Friedlander’s retirement in 2010, the then- CEO of the Road Transport Forum said: “The forum has tried to merge trucking associations” and that he saw the failure to do this as his “greatest failure as CEO, but the objective remains”. In his presentation, Tony also said that it was “not hard to design structure” but warned that implementation would not be easy and cited fiefdoms, parochial interests and personalities as barriers that had to be overcome. He asked this question: “Do the leaders have the courage?” Events last year suggest they don’t. Eleven years on, and we see the divide between the industry associations is even greater now than it was back in Tony’s day – which I suppose proves that rudders work even when going backwards.

After the announcements were made, and as to be expected, the spin took over. Transporting NZ came out and said that it still represented the interest of four of the five industry associations – regions 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Road Transport Association (RTA). This is a curious statement given that, until recently, the Road Transport Forum was claiming to represent the three industry associations in the country – the National Road Carriers (NRC), the RTA and the NZ Trucking Association (NZT). But, suddenly, NRC and NZT are now only one organisation, the Owner Carriers Association of New Zealand (OCANZ). NRC and NZT have been joined at the hip for many years through OCANZ, so why OCANZ should suddenly become identified as a single representative organisation beats me.

While this was going on, OCANZ was saying that between them, NRC and NZT have 64% of the membership of organisations. If this is so, it is hard to see how Transporting NZ and RTA can survive. No doubt there will be some well- meaning attempts at member poaching, but it is hard to see how this will achieve long-term benefits for the industry. Only by presenting a single united front to the government will the industry receive the recognition and credibility it deserves. To pick up on another of Tony’s comments from 2010, beware of trinket salesmen.

I do not know who decided to rebrand the forum nor why this went ahead when it did, considering what was smouldering away in the background, but it is fair to say somebody did not read the room. If there are repercussions for what happened, it remains to be seen where this leads and, most importantly, who ends up leading it. Maybe it will be the members who will ultimately decide.