Road trains, kangaroos, wombats, oh my: Trucking down-under

My wife, Marcia, and I had an opportunity to travel around the globe to Australia and enjoy a cruise out of Sydney north along the Great Barrier Reef to Cairns, Queensland. Before we departed, Marcia posted in a Facebook group that if there happened to be any truckers on board, we'd enjoy an opportunity to visit and share stories of what is happening with our counterparts in the down-under world of trucking.

Meet Kevin Forbes. Forbes is an experienced veteran of Australian trucking, traveling with some of his family -- including his son, 38-year-old Mitchell who's followed in his father’s footsteps since the age of 18. How did the elder Forbes get his start? Kevin’s a veteran of the Australian Navy and Air Force -- this was the gateway for his transition to trucking in the 1980s.

Mitch entered the business beginning at 18 with a license qualifying him to drive a single-drive-axle straight truck, and in the next couple of years he graduated up to the Australian "Multi Combination" (or MC) license. This qualifies an operator to pull any size or combination of trailers, all the way up to the “road train,” a combination of 3 or 4 trailers, and maximum legal weights or oversize loads. Mitch has done it all to date, currently pulling a set of double dumps hauling aggregates locally for an asphalt plant.

For a time, both father and son were trucking for the same company in these two cabovers. Kevin is still with the fleet.

It's easy to recognize the pride the two Forbes bring to both work and family life, and I can hear in their stories many themes also common to those of North American truckers. Here in Australia, truckers and trucking companies battle many of the same issues: those related to employment like pay and benefits packages, inconsistent driver training, even independent contractor v. employee status for operators.

Kevin Forbes (left) and Mitch Forbes (right) with the author of this story, Gary Buchs.The hottest of hot-button issues in our conversation: growing numbers of new-immigrant truck operators who did not come to Australia by obtaining a work visa but by subverting the immigration system and applying for a student visa that was described as easy to obtain. It just so happened I met three Australian Federal Police officers on a walk in Sydney, and had a conversation about this problem. The student visa allows the person to work up to 20 hours a week, but what’s happening is employers are paying these people lower wages with cash, off the books. Kevin Forbes noted such employers are often-enough foreign-owned, and all too willing to underbid freight rates.

The result of a declining market and exploitation of cheaper labor? There’s been an increasing number and severity of accidents, and like here in North America, it sounds like regulators’ and insurance companies’ reactions are focused more on driving restrictions and drivers’ age, rather than whether the operator has received adequate training. For example, as is the case for many in the U.S., a 25-year-old has a less-restricted path for employment primarily because of age and the ability to be insured under a given policy.