AusRAIL PLUS 2009: interview with Lance Hockridge

Day three of the conference has the ever popular ‘CEO’s Forum’, moderated this year by ARA chief executive Bryan Nye. This is a rare opportunity to see the heads of the major players in the rail industry together in an open discussion and provides a chance for professionals in rail to put their questions directly to those planning the future of rail.
QR chief executive Lance Hockridge, who will be a part of the forum on November 19th, speaks with the AusRAIL team about some of the critical issues facing QR and the rail industry generally.

Listen to Lance Hockridge share his thoughts about rail safety and ‘zero harm’

There are a number of major projects in the QR pipeline. How will your existing and future plans be affected by the Queensland governments planned restructuring of the organisation?

LH: This is a really interesting question and I’m sure I’ll be spending a lot of time talking to my colleagues about that at AusRAIL. The key message throughout is that at QR it’s ‘business as usual’. That’s what our owners have said to us. They continue to support us as we manage this period, which is of course, uncertain until we find out exactly what is going to happen. But, my key message in our company is, as I say ‘business as usual’. It’s about safety, it’s about looking after our customers, it’s about performing well commercially and it’s about growing the business. We are focused on all of these things and we have a series of plans and actions that are underway around this. We are seeing evidence of [QR] continuing to get that kind of improvement in our business. Some of the recent contracts that we’ve been able to win show that, even in this period of uncertainty, we’re keeping our eye on the ball; we’re really focused on looking after our customers, we’re really focused on growing our business. Ultimately what happens with the question of privatisation is what we are pretty interested in, but it’s a question for the owners.

Rail is touted as the future for freight transport in a carbon constrained world, but some claim much of the existing road freight task is not interchangeable with rail. How can rail better position itself for the anticipated growth in freight towards 2030?

LH: I think this has got to be a debate that is less about either/or and more about how we do more with less. How we cooperate; how we really get the best out of a multimodal environment in Australia. I’ve been around for a while now and this is a debate that’s been going on and that I’ve been engaged in from lots of different perspectives but, as we think about carbon constrained growth and the scale of the growth, and notwithstanding the scale of the GFC, we still expect to see interstate volumes double in the next 15 years. We can see the size of the resource task in Australia. Rail is so well positioned around all of that, we have all of the environmental advantage. We’re building on the work that has been going on in the freight networks, particularly investment that has gone into the interstate network that the ARTC has been spending on so greatly. The challenge is how to take advantage of all of that, the challenge is how do we have the right terminals, how do we put together the right quality of service, how do we get the message out there that we have these environmental credentials and that we are able to trade on it to take maximum advantage out of it. Again that is a large part of the discussion I think we’ve got to have as an industry and with our customers in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Finally Lance, what positive messages do you hope to see coming out of AusRAIL Plus 2009?

LH: I think it is about leadership. We are in a very different situation as we’ve experienced the real impact of the GFC over the last 12 month. There is so much going on in our industry. Whether, as in our case, it’s the whole question of privatisation and what it will mean for us. Our major competitor in the freight space has been through a revitalisation. We see the tremendous growth the passenger parts of our business are achieving. There is lots of great opportunity out there, equally there are lots of challenges that we’ve got to meet head on. That’s about leadership. This is the opportunity of the entire breadth of leadership in and around this industry to come together, understand what those challenges are, talk about it and demonstrate the kind of leadership we need to really take our industry and our businesses forward. I’m looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be a great time and we’ll get a really good ‘kick along’ out of this conference. I think it will be a great time.

The panel of the CEO’s Forum at AusRAIL PLUS includes:
.David Marchant, CEO, ARTC and Chairman, Australasian Railway Association
.Bob Stobbe, CEO, TransAdelaide
.Don Telford, CEO, Pacific National and COO, Asciano
.Rob Mason, CEO, RailCorp
.Rob Barnett, CEO, V/Line
.Lance Hockridge, CEO, QR
.Tony Braxton-Smith, CEO, Great Southern Railway
.John Cleland, CEO, WestNet Infrastructure Group
.John Fullerton, CEO, FrieghtLink
.Reece Waldock, CEO, Public Transport Authority, WA
.Jim Quinn, CEO, KiwiRail
.Dennis Clich, CEO, Yarra Trams
.Alan Chaplin, Managing Director, Connex

To enquire about AusRAIL PLUS 2009 please contact our Customer Service Department on: +61 (0)2 9080 4307
Or email registration@informa.com.au
Or visit: www.ausrail.com