Fair weather friends
It wasn’t much of a morning on Tuesday, and so the two bus drivers, Monish and Abbu, found themselves standing outside Parliament in the rain. A group of others, including local government politicians Ros and Tom, stood with them. The bus drivers had brought a petition, and they hoped the Minister might come down from her Beehive office to receive it.
Driving a bus isn’t for the fainthearted, least of all in Wellington. Our passengers are probably nicer than many - that mix of the well-heeled and weird that makes the capital special. But no driving gig is without its cranks and nuts and drunks. And then there’s our local geography, the hills and hairpin turns and skinny gauntlets we pretend are two-way streets.
Between the conditions and the pay, it’s always been hard to coax kiwis behind the wheel. Many of our bus drivers have come from overseas.
Things came to a head in 2022 when Wellington, along with much of the country, found itself with a bus driver shortage. There'd been a perfect storm. COVID upped the health risk to drivers, and mask mandates made their passengers angrier - so some drivers ditched the work for better-paying industries or retirement. Border closures prevented these drivers being replaced.
The shortage meant cancelled bus services, and that meant furious travellers, even in good-mannered Pōneke. Again, Aotearoa looked to other countries for drivers to make up the numbers, especially the Philippines, India, and Fiji, where Monish and Abbu came from.
These drivers came here in good faith, told their mahi would give them a pathway to residency. It’s a hell of a thing to emigrate: to box up your belongings, to watch your kids say goodbye to their friends, to hope the embrace you give your aging parents won’t be the last. Some of the new drivers spent many thousands to come here. Some even sold their businesses. That left them with nothing to return to; but then, they were looking forward towards their new lives, not back.
With the buses running reliably again, thanks to the new drivers, Wellington sighed with relief. On one trip I took, a kiwi driver - a cheery goodhearted older guy - was training a group of arrivals. He seemed to love the role, gently quizzing his protégés as they stood around him, swaying with the corners and attentively nodding along. There was something about this scene on the bus, the welcome extended to our new Wellingtonians, that touched me, and I wrote an email to Metlink, the transport provider, to pass on my positive feedback.
Humans have our many differences; but mahi, the act of rolling up our sleeves, of doing together whatever needs to be done, has a way of putting difference in perspective.
Three years since they arrived, many of the new drivers’ visas are coming to an end. If they don’t qualify for residency they’ll have to leave the country. But the residency rules have changed, upping the requirement for English language proficiency. The drivers say the English requirement is now the same standard for enrolling in a Master’s degree, far exceeding the language skills they use on the job. Some have spent thousands more from their modest wages on English tests for residency, only to fail again and again.
At the same time, the Government is clamping down on employers who look to hire migrants before jobless kiwis. There’s a logic to this; but the reality is that the other requirements of bus driving, like a clean licence, a lack of convictions and ability to pass a drug test, rule a lot of people out. And there’s something different about boarding a bus driven by someone to whom the mahi means everything - not someone pushed into the job, who’d rather be someplace else.
There are about a hundred Wellington drivers in jeopardy, and many more around the country - skilled enough for us when our economy needed them, but somehow unskilled and surplus now. Their departure will probably spark another shortage, landing our public transport system right back in square one. But that’s not all that will be lost.
If you know Pōneke, you know what we’re like at our best. In a xenophobic climate that tells us to make enemies of our neighbours, we instead make a politely stubborn point of co-existing. We send our kids to school together, smile at one another in the supermarket, and say hello over the fence.
It takes gumption to stand outside the Parliament of a country that no longer wants you; papers in hand, with rows of signatures that civilly call only for your dignity.
The group was met by a handful of Opposition MPs, but the Minister didn’t show. Monish and Abbu left as they had arrived, in the rain.
References
Minister gets tough on employers choosing migrants over New Zealanders | RNZ News
Greater Wellington warns immigration rules risk bus driver shortage – Hutt City News
Migrant bus drivers need to attain post-graduate level English for residency | RNZ News
Wellington council calls for review of immigration settings for bus drivers - Inside Government NZ