A big weekend and bigger questions ahead 

The General Election is upon us this weekend. This is the most fascinating election I can recall for a long time, and I’m sure a lot of the country will be following it closely. 

Regardless of what happens, I don’t think we’ll understand the workings and the impacts for several weeks, but the sun will still come up on Sunday. With the exception of road funding, where one team has said there’ll be no increase in Fuel Excise Duty, by and large the six major parties seemed to be broadly in agreement on most other transport issues. We don’t see any issues with our Election Platform requests being overly problematic for one party versus another.

Over the waters, I’m not sure what will happen given the results of the US Midterm elections, however fingers crossed the challenges we face with fuel start to be better managed.   

Fun facts on China’s road freight activity  

I like comparing numbers and I was interested to see some official statistics from the 2025 China Transport Industry Development Report. 

In New Zealand we move about 300 million tonnes annually by road. China carries about 145 times more with 43.29 billion tonnes. China’s population is about 280 times ours.   

China has 11.69 million operational freight vehicles, forming the backbone of domestic land freight. We have about 40,000 vehicles. If our population was multiplied by 280, that would give us 11.2 million vehicles. 

China’s heavy fleet is undergoing profound green transformation. The number of new energy commercial freight vehicles hit 336,100 units at the end of 2025.  

China is currently consulting on mandating active safety systems: Electronic Stability Control (ESC), Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEBS), Lane Departure Warning (LDWS), blind-spot monitoring and surround-view cameras for heavy trucks. Electronic Braking Systems (EBS) will be compulsory for heavy tractors and heavy semi-trailers above 10 tonnes. This policy is not dissimilar to the one Associate Transport Minister Meager recently decided not to progress further here.  

Industry leadership  

A quick shout out to the New Zealand Intermodal Transport Safety Group (NZITSG). The Group reached another great milestone with its development of a vehicle certification system for the specialist equipment that sideloaders present. 

I’m mindful that service providers and vehicle operators can do all this great work but to maximise the potential benefits, it’s absolutely vital that people using ISO containers to move their freight be responsible and ensure they’re using operators actively engaged in the NZITSG system. We need to keep pushing the fact that people that use and pay for freight ultimately drive the levels of service the industry provides.    

NZTA funding of truck driver rollover course ends  

New funding will be sought by industry following NZTA’s advice this week that it will no longer support the industry truck rollover prevention courses that have run over the last decade.  

Those courses were made freely available to all truck drivers in the country, and have been attended by somewhere in the order of 10,000 drivers. Our challenging terrain and mountainous road network inherently exposes us to a higher level of rollover risk, therefore we’ll be working hard to make sure this risk is still managed. 

A quarter-century of operator safety reform 

I recently received a 2001 letter on LTSA letterhead from one of the original trial participants. It was a reminder that it is now a quarter of a century since LTSA began trialling an Operator Safety Rating scheme. 

Those trials eventually led to the Operator Safety Rating Rule in 2008. The intention was to publish operator safety ratings from 2013, helping identify high-risk operators and encouraging them to improve their safety performance. 

NZTA eventually began publishing ratings in 2018, but the system struggled to deliver what was intended. It was progressively wound back before being abandoned entirely in 2024. 

Unfortunately, rogue operators have not gone away and, anecdotally at least, the problem appears to be growing. That is why next year we intend to put greater focus on NZTA’s role in effectively regulating the operators it licenses.