Australia needs 28,000 more truck drivers while its Punjabi workforce faces roadside abuse

Jaswinder Boparai was standing at a South Australian truck stop, speaking Punjabi to his wife on the phone, when a stranger walked over and spat on him. Boparai, an Australian citizen and father of two who runs a small fleet of trucks, has spent more than a decade moving freight around the country. He told ABC News the moment has stayed with him. “That is one incident, which I will never forget because it’s humiliating,” he said. His account, gathered alongside those of other Indian-origin drivers, has pushed a hard question into public view. Australia depends on these workers to keep its supermarkets stocked, so why do many of them describe the job as a daily test of their dignity?

A workforce that is ageing and running short

The freight task is growing while the people who carry it are getting older. Jobs and Skills Australia, the federal advisory body, counts about 189,900 truck drivers in the country, with a median age of 48 compared with 39 across all occupations. Industry Skills Australia describes truck driving as the ninth most common job in Australia, which gives a sense of the scale of the gap now opening up. The International Road Transport Union, in its 2024 global shortage report, found that 47 per cent of Australian drivers were aged 55 or older and fewer than 6 per cent were under 25. The same study estimated that about 21 per cent of the nation’s drivers are due to retire by 2029.

The vacancies are already large. Industry bodies, citing the same 2024 data, put the number of unfilled heavy-vehicle driving positions at roughly 28,000, a figure that has climbed year on year. The National Road Transport Association, known as NatRoad, has reported that about 70 per cent of operators struggle to attract new drivers, and that women make up only around 6 per cent of the workforce. Without new entrants, the shortfall is forecast to widen sharply by the end of the decade, leaving a task that underpins nearly every supermarket shelf, hospital delivery and regional resupply run short of hands.

Punjabi drivers behind the wheel

Much of the gap is being filled by migrants, and a large share of them come from Punjab. Australia’s India-born population reached 971,020 by 30 June 2025, making it the largest overseas-born group in the country for the first time on record, ahead of England on 970,950 and China on 732,000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That community grew by about 522,000 people in the decade to 2025, the biggest increase of any birthplace group. ABC News has described Indians as the fastest-growing migrant community in the freight sector.

Precise numbers for Punjabi drivers are hard to pin down. Industry figures suggest about one in ten truck drivers was born overseas, rising to roughly 14 per cent at companies with 200 or more staff. Radio Haanji, a Punjabi-Australian broadcaster, has estimated that Indians account for around 5 per cent of the country’s truck drivers, or some 12,000 people, though that figure rests on a single community source rather than official data. The presence shows in other ways. A Facebook group, Punjabi Truck Drivers (Australia), connects drivers across states, and the langar tradition of the gurdwara, a free communal meal open to anyone regardless of faith or background, remains a familiar support for those on long hauls.

Reports of spitting, slurs and threats

The abuse described by drivers was documented in an investigation by ABC News reporter Holly Toop, whose findings were picked up across Indian and diaspora media. Boparai’s account of being spat on was one of several. Narinder Singh, who drove trucks in New Zealand for a decade before moving to Australia, left the freight industry here after only eight months. He said he was mocked for wearing a turban, called a “currymuncher” and repeatedly told to leave the country, often after minor workplace mistakes. “They’ll swear profanity, show you fingers, tell you to go back, and call you names,” he told the broadcaster. His decade of experience across the Tasman counted for little against the hostility he met at Australian stops.

Some of the most disturbing material came over citizens band radio, the open channel that drivers rely on to warn each other about hazards, breakdowns and police checks. A driver named Pippal Singh told ABC News he had recorded a series of violent anti-Indian messages broadcast on those channels, and that he now rarely switches his radio on, even though doing so costs him a safety tool the job assumes every driver will use. One recording carried the words “a good Indian is a dead Indian”, alongside longer threats too graphic to reproduce in full. Because the channel is anonymous, drivers say the people responsible are almost impossible to identify. The Australian Human Rights Commission has said it is aware of racist conduct in the road freight sector and has received complaints from workers connected to the industry, while noting that investigations are difficult when abuse is broadcast without a name attached.

A minister condemns the abuse

The reports drew a response from the federal government. In July 2026, in an interview with NDTV that followed a visit to Australia by the Indian prime minister, the Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration, Tony Burke, called the situation “a grim reality”. He pointed to investment in migrant worker support centres in capital cities and to visa reforms designed to stop employers using visa cancellation as a threat against workers who report mistreatment. Burke also acknowledged that migrant workers often hesitate to approach government agencies for fear of losing their visa or their job, which leaves many incidents unreported. His remarks set the drivers’ accounts within a wider debate about how newcomers are treated, and about the distance between political rhetoric and the experience of workers on the road.

Pay, hours and the cost of the job

Conditions add to the strain. Jobs and Skills Australia records median earnings for truck drivers of about $1,780 a week before tax, with 89 per cent working full time and average hours of 49 a week, well above the 44 hours typical across all jobs. Long shifts, time away from family and tight delivery schedules are constant features of the work. Fatigue is a recognised safety risk across the sector, and racial harassment adds another layer, since abuse can affect a driver’s concentration at the wheel. For drivers who already feel unwelcome at some stops, the pressure of the job and the hostility of a minority of strangers can be hard to separate, and the toll is measured in people leaving the industry as much as in any single incident.

What it means for the diaspora and for Australia

For the Indian-Australian community, trucking has become a significant source of work and a point of pride, part of how a fast-growing population has found its footing. The same values that sit behind the gurdwara kitchen have shaped visible community service. Sikh Volunteers Australia, founded in Victoria in 2014 by a group of first-generation migrants, served 78,000 free meals in 115 days after it began daily deliveries in March 2020, drawing directly on the langar principle that everyone eats together. That instinct to feed strangers sits awkwardly against the image of a driver being spat on for speaking his own language.

For Australia, the stakes are practical as well as moral. The freight network keeps supermarkets, hospitals and regional towns supplied, and it needs tens of thousands of new drivers within a few years. Many of those recruits will be migrants, and a good number will be Punjabi. Whether they stay may depend as much on whether the roads and truck stops feel safe as on the pay packet. Narinder Singh has already left. A country that is short of drivers can ill afford to lose the ones who still want to do the work.