Logistics: Australia actively seeks truck drivers – politics

Denise Thompson, 68, was flying across Australia before air-conditioning trucks. In 1983 it was 53 degrees in the Nularbor Desert. During his most active years, he traversed the smoky fires of southern Australia, flooding roads in Queensland, a total of 170,000 kilometers per year between Darwin, Cairns, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. He once accepted urgent work from a funeral in Warnampool, his hometown of Victoria. A day trip with the corpse. What not to do for customer satisfaction.

And Thompson knew eleven years ago that there was a problem in his business. He said, “There is a shortage of young people who want to become long-distance drivers Warnpool StandardThis will be “a problem for the future”.

Denise Thompson was right. The Australia Association of Trucking (ATA) declared him the “Professional Longest Driver of the Year” on the Gold Coast last Friday. For many like him who admire the loneliness of a long-distance driver there was certainly something to do with this. According to the job search portal The sea There were 20,900 vacancies for truck drivers in Australia at the end of April. In the newspaper Australian Logistics entrepreneur Brad Rogers says: “The main problem with any type of truck transport in Australia right now is the lack of skilled workers.”

There is a shortage of long distance drivers around the world. The reasons for this are varied. But in a nutshell, you can describe it like Hanno Friedrich, a transport economist from the University of Hamburg-Kohne Logistics on the American news portal. Vox Did: “This is a disgusting job.”

This is especially true in Australia. Only 25.8 million people live in the big country. Traveling under the pressure of time in a vast land uninhabited is a burden: boredom, social isolation, no access to fresh food. Roads are sometimes bad, and so are wages. As the trips go through different administrative districts, there are constant security checks. And the federal government is lenient in making truck driving safer, more profitable, and cleaner with electric drives. The responsible organization has been making reforms since November 2018. As ATA board member David Smith angrily puts it, so far “without a single tax that can be submitted to Parliament for a vote”.

After all, the government supports one of the approaches to address the shortage of long-distance drivers: a new training program. Rapid work permits for refugees should also help. More ideas? In the United States, retailer Walmart has raised the annual salary for entry-level employees to $ 110,000.

Anyway, Denise Thompson did what she could to deal with the crisis, including developing young talents. Daughter Leah Goshen is a dedicated long-distance driver. She and her husband took over her father’s moving company. Like him, he recently received a special honor: the film was selected by Leah Gossans in the company’s own Navy. It adorns the front page of the 2021/22 Warnpool Area Business Directory.