The Australian Road Lobby: Bitumen Mafia or Bogeyman?

ABSTRACT

Transport academics and activists alike frequently build up the “road lobby” to be a menacing force, secretly controlling transport policy across Australia. Just who makes up that lobby and how it affects policy is rarely explained with rigour. This article seeks to start the process of demystifying the road lobby. It identifies two approaches to defining it and, using various documentary sources, charts its channels of influence, as well as some limits to its power. It ends by setting down a challenge: for our discipline to ascribe such influence to the road lobby, we must seek stronger, more compelling evidence.

摘要

交通学者和活动家们经常把“道路游说团”建设成一股威胁性的力量，秘密控制着整个澳大利亚的交通政策. 仅仅是谁组成的游说团，以及它如何影响政策，很少有人用严谨的解释. 本文试图开始揭开道路大堂的神秘面纱. 它确定了两种定义它的方法，并使用各种文献来源，绘制了它的影响渠道图，以及它的权力的一些限制. 最后，我们提出了一个挑战：要让我们的纪律将这种影响归因于道路游说团体，我们必须寻求更有力、更有说服力的证据.

KEYWORDS:

• Road lobby
• freight lobby
• vested interests
• transport politics
• pressure politics
• rent seeking
• RACV

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article has been greatly improved thanks to the notes of my two anonymous reviewers.

2. For the UK, see Finer (1958), Hamer (1987) and Dudley and Richardson (2000). For the United States, see Yago (1982).

3. Car manufacturing ceased in Australia in 2017, but the industry still imports and sells a large volume of cars – around a million per year, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (2018).

4. Their interest in roads is complicated. Some roads might have the potential to compete with their routes – in which case we might imagine a toll road company lobbying against such a project, or at least seeking compensation if there happen to be non-compete clauses in their contract with the state, as Transurban has for CityLink – see Millar and Schneiders (2016). We might therefore qualify their involvement in the road lobby as advocating for some roads but not all.

5. Figures for the more recent 2019 election were yet to be published at time of writing.

6. This is also the favoured approach of much – but not all – work on interest groups in political science. For a review see Jordan et al. (2004).

7. For a complete list of these see Australian Trucking Association (2019).

8. Indeed, they are quite diverse in their business interests. Most clubs own driving schools and resorts; the NRMA runs part of Sydney’s ferry service; the RACV owns a salary packaging business; the RACQ operates as a bank.

9. Calculations made via Factiva on 26 October 2019.

10. The Abbott Government’s (2013–15) explicit policy of refusing funding to rail is the brief exception that proves the rule here: see Bowen (2013).

11. Unlike some of the other associations examined thus far, the Property Council is usually transparent about the scale of its policy advocacy. Its 2015–17 strategy reveals it budgeted $6.7 million for advocacy, with 38 staff working in their public policy unit (Property Council of Australia, 2015, p. 11).

12. As one reviewer noted, this would seem to be the closest thing to the actual “bitumen mafia”.

13. Of course, some unions actually do have a vested interest in some modes over others – the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, for instance, or the Transport Workers Union. How active they might be in lobbying for infrastructure is not some that seems to have been subject of any research or documentation.

14. For example, long-time Chairman of the RACV, Ross Heron, was head of VicRoads before that; the RACV’s head of public policy for many years was Brian Negus, who served a long career in VicRoads and the CRB before it. The full extent of the “revolving door” in the road lobby is a question worthy of further study.

15. The Metropolitan Transport Committee: composed of executives from the Railways, Tramways, and various road authorities.

16. The Country Roads Board: the agency charged with building the freeway network, precursor to VicRoads.