On Wednesday, ARA General Manager – Freight and Heavy Haul, Georgia Nicholls, alongside colleagues from Freight on Rail Group (FORG) and the ARTC, represented the rail freight sector as part of a freight and logistics sector roundtable informing the Australian Government’s ‘COVID-19 Response Inquiry: Improving future preparedness‘. 

The Australian Government announced an independent inquiry into Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on 21 September 2023 to review what worked and what improvements can be made to Australia’s preparedness for future pandemics. The freight and logistics roundtable is one of 20 sector roundtables as part of a broader consultation program which will inform a final report to government by 30 September 2024. 

The discussion on behalf of industry focused on the importance of some critical challenges which could be better managed for future preparedness: 

  • Inconsistent, poor coordinated nationally, and sometimes inadequate definition of critical/essential workers in the freight and logistics sector; 
  • The unhelpful, overly bureaucratic and poorly coordinated constraints imposed on the movement of critical workers, particularly controls on the movement across state borders, and within metropolitan areas, created considerable challenges and imposed major costs on businesses trying to maintain freight flows as part of critical national supply chains; 
  • An overall focus on resilience of the rail network infrastructure is critical to the rail freight sector’s ability to respond and contribute to the freight task across corridors of national significance at future times of crisis. This requires additional Commonwealth funding for measures to improve the ability of track assets to withstand and recover from (and provide redundancy) extreme weather, noting the 2024-2025 Federal Budget funding. 

The findings from consultation conducted by the panel to date, information gaps identified and recommendations from stakeholders demonstrated a strong alignment with input we have received from industry, and suggests rail freight representatives and freight and logistics sector colleagues have participated strongly in this review already. 

 The panellists were interested to learn more about the nature and extent of connectedness of the rail freight sector with relevant Commonwealth agencies and perceived adequacy which the ARA undertook to work with members and industry to detail for their consideration. This offers a direct opportunity for us to express further thoughts on the optimal approach to industry engagement with state and Commonwealth agencies during times of future crises. We will also use this opportunity to advance recommendations from the ARA’s resilience submission from 2023 of relevance, including: 

  • Update Disaster Recovery Funding arrangements to include critical rail infrastructure as essential public assets; 
  • Elevate resilience within the Commonwealth Government and incorporate explicit resilience targets in government policies and plans; 
  • List the National Interstate and the Hunter Valley Rail Networks as critical supply chain infrastructure; 
  • Include RIMs and industry representatives in the transport sector group of the Trusted Information Sharing Network; 
  • Embed resilience requirements in business case, planning, procurement and funding processes.