New Zealand BCA is closely watching recruitment numbers

The NZ Bus and Coach Association (BCA) is delighted to partner with Prime Creative Media to up the ‘Australasian’ in the Australasian Bus & Coach (ABC) Magazine. So many of the challenges and opportunities for our industry are the same either side of the ditch, and increased collaboration and information sharing can only be a good thing. As such, the BCA is committed to strengthening our relationship with BIC and supporting and encouraging shared learnings to the benefit of our broader industries.  

The landscape of our industry in NZ has changed, as it has in Australia, with increased consolidation not only of operators, but also within the supply chain. As it stands, one of the biggest challenges is the changed relationship between the bus operators and the service purchasers – central and local government. A swing from relationship-based agreements that relied on both parties doing the right thing to increasingly complex commercial arrangements has eroded trust on both sides, while pushing up compliance costs.  

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Government and council decision makers (whether because they’ve rejected it or because it’s no longer being offered), are no longer receiving expert advice from the industry. That is a real problem, because it’s resulting in decisions that have negative implications for not just our industry, but also taxpayers, ratepayers and average Kiwi families.  As an industry, we’re well placed to share expertise to help our clients and stakeholders better achieve their desired outcomes, and to do this effectively we’re going to need to strengthen relationships and develop better international evidence on best practice. 

Like Australia, we’ve faced a battle with skills shortages across the sector. While this isn’t unique to our industry, the difficulty we’ve had with recruitment and retaining urban bus drivers has been very visible to the public, with resulting service cancellations as high as 20 per cent at times, and necessitating timetable changes. Improvements to pay, funded jointly by operators, central and local government, and changes to immigration settings, combined with an amazing recruitment and onboarding effort from bus operators, saw hundreds of new drivers relocating to New Zealand and cancellation rates returning to acceptable levels.  

Unfortunately, the immigration changes were recently cancelled by the incoming government, leaving real concerns within the industry about how we will maintain driver numbers at required levels. BCA is closely watching the work being undertaken by APTIA on recruitment and retention, and looks forward to opportunities to share the learnings in the NZ context.  

And speaking of opportunities to share learnings, the BCA would like to extend a very warm welcome to all Australasian industry participants to attend our annual conference to share experiences, network and have some fun. The event will be held at Auckland’s Due Drop Events Centre from October 1-3. We hope to see you there!