THE headline initiative in the Federal Budget last Tuesday, for the transport industry, was the decision to increase the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge from 27.2 cents per litre of diesel to 32.4c/l.
The increase will be phased in over three years between 2023-24 and 2025-26.
The increase has been attacked by the transport industry and in response, the Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers said the change to the Road User Charge was a decision of the Infrastructure and Transport Ministers in April 2023, to contribute to road maintenance and repair.
“Our choice was to increase by 10% a year or 6% a year. We decided on 6%,” Dr Chalmers said.
South Gippsland-based transport operator, Stuart Storr of Storr Transport, said the increase in the user charge would have to be passed on to the consumer. He also rejected the claim that transport fees and charges were going into road maintenance.
“My concern is that both levels of government are seeing the transport industry as a cash cow but that’s completely wrong. We’ve got to watch our costs closely on a daily basis and something like this has to be passed on. It’s got to be passed on,” said Mr Storr.
“And as soon as that happens, everyone passes it on all the way to the consumer so that’s got to be inflationary, hasn’t it.”
A back of the envelop calculation by Mr Storr put the 5.2 cent per litre levy increase at upwards of $40,000 per annum.
“That’s a lot and across the board, it’s a lot of money coming out of the transport industry.
“But we’re already paying a lot of money to register our trucks, for example it costs about $18,000-a-year to register a b-double with two trailers.
“That money is supposed to be going into road maintenance but increasingly, it’s not going into road maintenance.
“There’s a broken culvert (on the South Gippsland Highway), on the Foster side of Toora that we reported five months ago. They’ve tried to cover it up, but it’s broken.
“They’re not fixing the roads and the result of that is your maintenance costs go up. I was looking at mine the other day, and they’ve gone up by 25 per cent in a year, and we need to be passing that on as well. It’s another cost on us and on the economy.”
Mr Storr is also concerned that the State Government might be preparing to increase the cost of truck registrations, not only for transport operators, but also to primary producers who are presently able to register trucks for a reduced amount.
