The Australasian Railway Association (ARA) advocates for policy and regulatory reforms to enhance rail’s role in a sustainable transport future.
The ARA is actively working with industry and the National Transport Commission (NTC), Office of National Rail Industry Coordination (ONRIC), Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR), and state and federal governments to identify opportunities for reform in several key areas – harmonisation, interoperability, workforce development, sustainability, supporting local manufacturing, increasing freight mode share and resilience and improving gender diversity.
We are at an important juncture in the political landscape and must keep up the momentum to ensure rail is front and centre on both sides of the fence and at both levels of government.
The COVID pandemic highlighted the importance of strong supply chains and a sustainable workforce and there is also an increasing focus on the need to step up decarbonisation efforts now to meet future national net zero targets.
Harmonisation and poor interoperability remain huge challenges for rail. We need a national approach to increase productivity and reach our full potential.
The current boom-and-bust cycle of rail infrastructure projects hinders local suppliers, making it difficult for them to invest in workforce development and asset capability. Without a steady flow of projects, rail risks losing suppliers and skilled workers to other industries.
Our industry is also facing a 70,000-workforce shortage, exacerbated by a retirement cliff, and skills gaps are also growing, largely because of increasing digitalisation, with emerging technologies that require new skills in areas such as signalling. In the freight sector, there is a strong focus on increasing mode share in Australia and New Zealand and the need for continued resilience investment due to disruptions from repeated severe climate events. This is also a priority area for the ARA.
Managing growth in both passenger and freight will be more important than ever with increasing urbanisation and congestion in our cities, aging populations and the freight task set to more than double by 2050.
We also need to see further improvements in level crossing safety at a national level, with too many distressing incidents still occurring on our networks despite extensive public campaigns.
A national approach
Australia operates across 29 separate rail networks, each with distinct standards, operating rules, and workforce requirements. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies and drives up costs.
The ARA strongly supports a national rail standards harmonisation strategy, ensuring a consistent regulatory environment to enhance interoperability and drive efficiency.
In 2024, we launched the Harmonisation of Rail Standards Research Report, which was jointly funded by the ARA, NTC, ONRIC and the Rail Industry Safety and Standards Board (RISSB). It is a watershed moment for the rail industry, providing an important body of evidence to progress this essential program of reform.
This report provides rigorous analysis to better inform ways to address current challenges in rail interoperability and prioritise the highest value areas of harmonisation.
It proposes practical recommendations and pathways for implementation.
We hope this work will give decision-makers the justification, business case, and solutions needed to drive change, particularly in supporting the National Standards Framework under the NTC’s National Rail Action Plan, ONRIC’s National Procurement and Manufacturing Plan, and RISSB’s critical role in developing standards.
The ARA fully supports the proposed approach and the development of a national rail standards harmonisation strategy to be developed by a national body.
An Australian-first framework to adopt a nationally standardised product type approval system for rail and road projects is also underway, following advocacy by the ARA.
A nationally consistent approach to local content policies would also reduce unnecessary capital investment and duplication of capability, deliver greater industry stability, job security, and support a more cost-effective, competitive rail manufacturing sector.
Rollingstock approvals is another important area for reform. Complicated and repetitive approval processes mean it can take longer to get a train approved to run across the country than it does to build it.
The ARA is working with industry to support ONRSR work to develop guidance on rollingstock safety assurance processes, pilot a single national application approach to register rollingstock operating on the national network of interoperability, and investigate ways to harmonise testing requirements and locations for rollingstock.
We are also working with the National Rail Manufacturing Advocate and the Rail Industry Innovation Council on supporting the development of the National Rail Procurement and Manufacturing Strategy.
The strategy is focused on a nationally coordinated approach to rollingstock procurement and manufacturing, growing manufacturing capability through harmonising standards, maximising public investment outcomes (including local content policies), and improving research and innovation collaboration between industry, customers, researchers and designers.
Increasing freight mode share and resilience
Since the release of the joint report Future of Freight by the ARA and the Freight on Rail Group just over a year ago, we have made several key submissions to government to support increased rail freight mode share and investment in rail freight.
The ARA welcomes the $1 billion allocated to enhancing rail resilience in last year’s Federal Budget, following extensive advocacy by the ARA and rail freight stakeholders for investment in the nation’s ageing rail infrastructure.
There will be an ongoing need to regularly review the state of infrastructure along key rail freight routes to ensure continued investment in upgrading and maintaining assets to withstand more frequent and severe weather events. In terms of heavy haul priorities, the Pilbara Rail Collaboration Centre (RCC) was established last year with funding from the Western Australian Government and in partnership with the ARA and CORE Innovation Hub to identify common sector challenges and opportunities to mitigate the costs and complexity, as well as accelerate the pace of transformation.
It will support initiatives to localise supply chains, improve workforce mobility, and work towards net-zero goals.
Workforce development
The ARA is actively working with governments and TAFE and universities to develop targeted courses and training programs, as well as developing our own professional development opportunities for industry. We recently launched our own industry-recognised Professional Certificate in Rail which took its first cohort of 65 people in March.
With female participation in the rail workforce at only 28 per cent, in 2024 the ARA commissioned significant research to inform best practice initiatives and training that fosters an inclusive and diverse workforce.
The report, Progressing Gender Equality in the Australasian Rail Industry, builds on the ARA Gender Diversity Data Report released every two years. We hope to have implemented most of its recommendations by the end of 2025. We would like to see rail become an employer of choice for women in the very near future.
The ARA is also undertaking important First Nations research to better understand barriers to participation.
We also continue to develop our Rail Industry Worker (RIW) program, which is a national competency and safety management system that has streamlined qualifications tracking for over 100,000 rail workers.
With the increasing need for workforce mobility, the RIW system ensures workers can seamlessly transition across projects and networks, helping address skill shortages and improve safety outcomes.
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