LIVESTOCK transporter John Mitchell has called on the Transport Minister Troy Buswell to launch an independent public inquiry into Main Roads.
The call follows a decision by the District Court recently that found in favour of Mitchell's Livestock Transport saying it did not have to put a partition in the front unit of its B-Double trailers, a move which Mr Mitchell believes would have made the trailers unsafe.
In 2002, Mr Mitchell built eight B-doubles at a length of about 20m of internal deck space but the rules were changed in 2008, restricting B-doubles to 18.8m of deck space.
Mr Mitchell then had two options - to either cut off the end of his eight trailers which would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars or put in a partition which he believed to be unsafe.
Main Roads continued to push Mr Mitchell to put in the partition but he repeatedly refused.
In the appeal, Commissioner Michael Gething ruled that if the partition had been implemented as Main Roads advised the result "could easily be catastrophic."
"The cost of the trailer-shortening modifications is estimated to be about $285,000 to modify all the trailers," Mr Gething said.
"To this is added the amount of $590,000 which the appellant (Mr Mitchell) says it will incur in costs by reason of having to remove the trailers from operation while the modifications to shorten them are carried out.
"It would cost the appellant about $1.7m to replace the non-compliant B-doubles, taking into account their residual value."
Commissioner Gething said if the B-double combination was loaded to 70.5tonnes (albeit unintentionally) and the risks identified by Mr Di Cristoforo (Mr Mitchell's expert witness) eventuated, the results could easily be catastrophic.
"It could lead to the driver of the combination losing control and crashing, causing injury or death to the driver and well as to those in other vehicles," he said.
"If the rear of the combination swung out, it could easily side swipe an oncoming vehicle and push it off the road.
"The same outcome could occur if the combination slipped on wet roads or loose surfaces.
"Accidents involving semi-trailers can have horrific consequences."
The three and a half year legal battle now means Mr Mitchell can use the trailers until June 2017.
But Mr Mitchell has called for an inquiry into Main Roads as to why the government organisation would push for something which would clearly be unsafe.
"Main Roads' sole aim in life should be to promote vehicle safety," Mr Mitchell said.
"The judge has found that its requirements were unsafe.
"In his judgement he pointed out the fact that Main Roads' solution to modify the vehicles would have made them unsafe.
"For three and a half years I have been pushing the same views and effectively the main reasons I didn't do it was that it was unsafe and I couldn't have my people or the community put in an unsafe position."
Mr Mitchell said Mr Buswell needed to run an independent public inquiry into not only the decision-making process of Main Roads, but what drove it to a decision to implement something which would be dangerous.
"Safety should be Main Roads' first, second and third rule," he said.
"There should be nothing higher than that.
"If they are making these decisions then there is obviously something wrong with their thinking, or their priorities, or their focus and that would be nice to know.
"It could have quite easily gone the other way and I could have installed the partitions and it would have killed someone and I would have been found negligent.
"The cost doesn't really come into it, because if you kill someone you can't bring them back."
Mr Buswell would not comment on the issue.
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