The least a passenger can expect from boarding a bus is that the bus company knows where you are departing from and where you are going to. Not so the case with Skybus which is not sure if we are even in Australia.
I recently engaged in a brief yet educational exchange with the customer services department of Kinetic, the company which runs Skybus, about the ‘vigorous’ pre-recorded Acknowledgement of Country which is played between Melbourne airport and the city. No sooner were the chocks away than an aggressive, unwelcoming pre-recorded announcement about how ‘sovereignty of the land we know as Australia was never ceded’ was played at maximum volume. Before they had even been told about arrival time and destination, every passenger was made to feel guilty about being on a bus on stolen land.
This was not the first time I had been berated on the Skybus, so I decided to contact someone at Kinetic and ask them a few questions. These were roughly along the lines of ‘what the company is expecting passengers to do about being on stolen land’, ‘if Kinetic was distributing any of its profits to those from those to whom they believe dealt this historic and ongoing injustice,’ and finally, ‘if Kinetic thought its core purpose was to offer a mode of transport or to make political commentary.’
Needless to say, no single question was answered. I was, however, politely informed that this particularly blistering version of the ‘Welcome to Country’ was part of Kinetic’s Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), that they are never going to stop playing it, and that if I didn’t like it, I could find alternative ways of getting to the airport.
I realised in hindsight what my mistake had been. I had entitled my email ‘Unwelcome Political messaging’, but I really should have said ‘Unwelcome Virtue Signalling & Moralising.’ Like most institutions in Australia, no matter how mundane they are (whether Kinetic likes it not, shuttle buses will never be sexy), Kinetic’s management have been thoroughly beguiled by the forces of wokery.
The top brass believe that they have found a higher calling, boasting that while ‘Kinetic is proud of our leadership in establishing high performance standards in mass bus transit,’ their ‘responsibility in the communities in which we live and work goes far beyond merely keeping people moving.’ The say that ‘while we are proud of our position as a leading mass transit bus operator perhaps the most important indication of our ongoing leadership is our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) priorities. (RAP).’
There you have it. It’s longer enough to just run a transit company. Sufficient meaning is no longer found in the purpose for which the company was created, which in Kinetic’s case, is to literally keep the country moving. Instead, you have to close the gap, stop climate change, and end global poverty. My email was not seen as adopting a different political opinion but as having taken the wrong moral stance. Kinetic and their values are good, while I and my values are bad.
What happens when companies start becoming society’s moral arbiters? They cancel your bank account. It is they who decide whether or not they need the customer, not whether or not the customer needs them. Kinetic informed me that I don’t have to catch Skybus if I don’t like the message, but what if management decided that they didn’t like my views? They might decide that I’m not quite the kind of person they want on their bus.
