In focus | melbourne protest bus

MELBOURNE OPERATOR TAKES PROTEST BUS TO THE STREETS

Victorian border closure uncertainty – affecting a charter bus business’s ability to reliably plan and honour tour bookings – plus Melbourne’s strict metro lockdown restrictions forced one local family owned and run bus operator to visibly protest his plight and put more than half of his bus fleet up for auction to help pay a spiralling multi-million dollar debt.

Laurie Pincini of Rockleigh Tours drove his protest bus around Melbourne metro precinct recently, covered in anti-Victoria premier Dan Andrews slogans.

Pincini says his business is “going backwards” and that “it’s screwed”, after having to put 12 of his 22 buses up for auction.

Speaking exclusively to ABC, he said that he has had to diversify his workload to include hay bailing and silage trucking to keep money flowing and help reduce a $3.8 million (and growing) debt –

Pincini recounted a harrowing financial predicament being felt by charter bus operators Australia-wide.

“We are driving silage trucks, we are doing hay contracting, we’re doing anything to try to make a dollar, mate – we’ve been closed since March 16,”

Pincini said.

“I’ve had one bus a day, or you know a couple out… Out of the 22 buses, the maximum I’ve had [doing] work has been five in one day doing V/Line at night-time, at 3.00am, 4.00am in the morning. That doesn’t’ pay the bills when it costs us $200K a month to open the door and you’ve only got $50K a month coming in.

“We’ve been in the bus game now for just on 75 years. We employ my sons, my daughters, my sons-in-laws, uncles, fathers in-laws, bloomin’ my kid’s uncle’s brothers-in-laws plus families and everything in the local community.

“Come the end of December and something opens and goes bang! They are all out of work because JobKeeper doesn’t work past then when I’ve got to pay them the 20 hours a week. I can’t afford it!”

When asked what the motivation behind the protest bus was, Pincini referred comparatively to the situation in NSW and said: “It’s been causing waves; it’s all around the world.”

The bus started doing the rounds recently when the amended Victorian Omnibus bill – still contentiously interpreted by pro-democracy civil libertarians while championed and defended by premier Daniel Andrews MP – was passed.

THE STRESS

Asked about the stress and impact this is all having on his family and himself, Pincini replied: “Well, mate – I’ve called Beyond

Blue... I’ve been there.

“I’ve had to make those phone calls; I’ve had to make those phone calls to family and friends... I know they are out and having depression again.

“When you walk past a yard full of buses and an empty shed and you go ‘there will be nobody here for the next two weeks, if I knock myself off who’s going to care?’ So it gets to that point, mate.

“The mental strain and pressure... And, you know fi nancially if the buses go, the house goes – they are only items. The mental pressure that you are dealing with that you’ve let your team down, your family down, your community down – that’s what the problem is.

“It’s not so much the fi nancial because all of a sudden you think you are a failure you’ve let so many people down because they have relied upon you to pay their mortgages and everything. And now they are struggling and they can’t make their mortgage repayments. And even though it [the pandemic] wasn’t our fault, you still take it to heart.”

BORDER GUARANTEE

Pincini says while they won’t reject any fi nancial assistance, the point of the exercise is to draw attention to the need to re-open borders fully.

“Until they can get borders open for the charter industry, the industry is screwed.

“Every time Queensland decides that three people in NSW have got it and they are going to close the border on them, how can an operator book a tour – a fi ve-day, 10-day, 15-day tour, whatever – to not be able to go across the border?

“It took us until September to get money back off Jetstar because of cancellations, so how do I go to book tours when there’s fl ights and things that cancel due to Covid and border closures and they only gave us back the money in the end because … they [the passenger/ airline] cancelled their fl ight?

“So how do we book tours and that knowing we’ve got no money coming back?

“If we can’t go because the tour can’t happen because the border’s closed and we lose fl ights, lose hotels, lose everything, you are even in worse sh*t.

“That’s why, as an industry, that’s what we need: we need guarantees the borders will stay open and they are not going to [close].

“When did we go from ‘living with Covid’ to ‘eradication’?

“It’s a stacked deck; none of us are going to be able to reach that.”

Above:

Pincini says that he was driven to protest by a lack of clarity on opening borders and keeping them open.

Left:

Pincini and his employees have been doing everything from driving silage trucks to hay contracting to try and keep themselves in business.

Opposite:

Since Covid hit, the most work that’s come through for Rockleigh Tours was running fi ve buses for rail replacement in the early morning.