The case against caravan licensing

Insurance statistics back up the claim that most caravanners are doing the right thing

We are a society that loves regulation. We seem to have become a country where there’s a rule or requirement for doing most things.

There’s been a big push over the last few years for a new law that requires a licensing system for people who tow large caravans (click here and here for more).

Caravanners are in the crosshairs for licensing because, as it stands, anyone with an unrestricted car licence is allowed to drive a rig with a gross combined mass of up to around 6500kg in the case of a typical vehicle and van combo.

The argument for licensing goes that such a driver might know nothing about the various weight requirements or have the necessary driving skills to tow such a rig.

So the inference is that there are legions of caravanners out there blissfully (or wilfully) ignorant of basic legal mass requirements, how to best load a van and how to tow one safely.

On forums, you see that some people agree with such a measure based on a logic that, unfortunately, we all use, either consciously or unconsciously. That is, in your travels, you might see a caravanner or two doing something stupid, and then that becomes proof that most, if not all, caravanners do the same.

It’s just human nature, and you can apply such thinking to anyone who does something you don’t like and who is not like us. Of the sub-set of road users, say that you see a few motorcyclists scream through traffic, their modified exhausts sounding like an angry hornet. You tend to think of all motorcyclists being aggressive hoons.

A BMW or two cuts you off in traffic, and yep, you begin to think of all BMW drivers as arrogant, truculent runts.

As for P-platers, well, aren’t they all hoons, each and every one of them?

Let’s look at the facts. The first fact is that there are no road crash statistics that include crashes involving caravans. The Road Crash database just doesn’t parse the stats to that degree. So clearly that’s a dead end.

So then let’s look at caravan insurance claims, where the caravanner has been at fault in a collision. That would be a sure sign of the caravan carnage enveloping us, and the insurance companies must be wringing their hands with the huge volume of payouts they have to make.

The Suncorp Group holds about 30 per cent of the caravan insurance market (under the AAMI, GIO, Apia and Suncorp Insurance brands) and the latest figures for the Group’s at-fault collision claims show a rise of 1 per cent in the last 12 months (from 30 June 2015 to 30 June 2016).

Insurance Australia Group, whose insurance brands include NRMA Insurance, CGU, SGIO, SGIC, and Swann Insurance, has had precisely zero increase in at-fault collision claims over the past three years.

This tends to support my theory that most caravanners concern themselves with having the correct weights properly distributed and appropriate tyre pressures and towing speed. Most I have spoken to hate the idea that their rig might sway, and would do anything to avoid it. They are keen to learn how to set-up their rig and to tow safely.

So how does such a proposal like caravan licensing get oxygen in the first place? There are a few theories for it, but basically Australian laws in the last 20 years have become more and more stringent, at all three levels of government.

Australia has made some fine road regulations, such as the mandatory seat belt laws, active nationwide by 1973, and our early introduction of random breath testing, entrenched nationally by the mid-1980s. It’s just we’ve got carried away with it.

You might argue that without our high degree of regulation that there would be anarchy. Well, I’ve got news for you. You won’t stop the recidivists no matter what you do; the figures I’ve seen suggest, for example, that 15 percent of drivers make up the bulk of high-range speeding. The rest of us follow the rules, and sometimes we make a mistake.

There isn’t a law yet that makes pure human error illegal, but I’m sure the regulators would love to institute one.

I’m not against regulation per se, but if we’re to continue down this path with the likes of a caravan towing licence, the only real winner is the bureaucracy, and the revenue stream that it can extract from such a move.

The case against caravan licensing

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