Barely a week after being reappointed by the new Premier, South Australia’s Transport Minister Pat Conlon has delivered the amendments that will bring SA’s ‘counting time rules’ to bring them into line with Queensland and New South Wales.
The amendments were printed in the State Gazette on 27 October and will come into operation on 10 November 2011 (Our thanks to the ATA for publishing these pages on their website).
The change will see South Australia adopt the Queensland / New South Wales approach to counting time. Under this approach, time must be counted forward:
- from the end of a relevant major rest break if one or more major rest breaks are relevant to the time period; or
- in any other case, from the end of a relevant period of rest time.
Although there’s nothing official on paper from Victoria just yet, we’re hearing that Minister Mulder and his team at VicRoads are on track and may get very close to achieving the same implementation date as South Australia.
The decision to make this change was taken by Transport Ministers on 20 May this year. It looks like it will be fully delivered in just under six months, which is what our Association had requested from both Minister Conlon and Minister Mulder in meetings a few months ago.
National President John Beer is sending a letter of thanks to Minister Conlon.
Seeing the counting time issue coming to a conclusion will be tremendously satisfying to a large number of people in industry, not least the drivers who received fines under the southern States laws. Once again, we should acknowledge the remarkable commitment of the Queensland Trucking Association and the TWU (NSW), both of whom actually did the hard yards to defend drivers before the Courts.
