A great win for the industry, but there is an important skilled occupation missing.Truck drivers.
There is an outdated perception in some quarters that truck driving is not a skilled occupation. Anyone watching a fully loaded B-Train negotiate the hairier parts of our state highway network knows otherwise. The men and women driving today’s modern trucks operate highly sophisticated vehicles, with high-tech sensors monitoring truck, trailer and load in a highly regulated environment and often on challenging infrastructure. Anyone who has seen a driver coax a fully laden log or stock truck and trailer up a steep twisting off-highway access road would have to acknowledge there is a high degree of skill involved.
Our truck driver workforce is also getting older. The average New Zealand truck driver is 57-years old.
Immigration New Zealand does not recognise that truck driving is a skilled occupation – they are not listed in the Skilled Migrant Category.
Here is the part that should worry the next Government most. The truck driving labour pool is international and mobile and, right now, we are not competing for it. Australian companies are actively recruiting our people. Meanwhile our own immigration settings place truck driving at level 4 on the ANZSCO scale, below the skilled-worker threshold, with no simple pathway to residency. A qualified driver weighing up New Zealand against a country that offers them a future looks elsewhere. We are not losing the contest on wages or lifestyle. We are losing it on paperwork.
It is not all doom and gloom. Operators around the country tell me they have hired school leavers who are genuinely excited about the job. They also tell me, quietly, that those people are getting harder to find.
There is no room for complacency. While we may not have a shortage of drivers right now, the economic recovery will make this bite quickly. Freight demand is climbing while the pool of available workers shrinks. There is an obvious danger here – a fast-recovering economy combined with a workforce shortage is a recipe for cutting corners on safety, and a higher cost of living for Kiwis.
So our fifth election call is twofold. Recognise truck driving as skilled work, with a genuine migration pathway to residency, so New Zealand can compete for the people it needs. We had it under the last Government and it needs to be reinstated alongside a robust vetting process to ensure we allow only compliant operators to import genuinely skilled drivers.
We also need to sharpen our accreditation and industry-training so drivers arriving here are fit for New Zealand conditions with clear competency standards for entering this industry and staying in it.
As an industry we must become better at recognising skill. If you employ drivers, it is time to connect to formalised skill recognition and training now MITO is back in industry control.
Auckland’s Congestion Question
Auckland Council this week announced three “Time of Use” options for tackling its clogged CBD and motorway network, generating a lot of debate.
National Road Carriers’ position is clear – we support exploring Time of Use as a tool to tackle congestion. Auckland’s peak travel delays cause truck drivers in the city to sit in traffic for an average of two and a half days each year.
The questions everyone has are: “Will Time of Use work for Auckland and which option is best?”
For road freight, these questions can’t yet be answered. More information is needed.
The success of the scheme rests on changing driver behaviour by getting commuters to pay for driving in the CBD or on the motorway at peak times. Sounds reasonable, but many drivers will still choose to drive at the same time, just on arterial roads.
What will it mean for journey times on the city’s strategic freight network when traffic relocates to avoid paying congestion charges? How much will truck operators have to pay for the congestion charge, and will there be a daily cap for those servicing the CBD? How will the Council measure that the scheme is delivering its journey time promises? And what guarantees will the Council provide that if it doesn’t hit journey time reduction targets it will remove the charge?
All important questions.
National Road Carriers has asked Council to provide this information, and we will continue to work with them to explore getting the answer Auckland needs to its congestion question.
Justin
