Perth Voice Interactive

THE verge poo bandit has been fined $200 after Vincent city council staff met with him to hand over the infringement.

The Swan Taxis driver, who’d pooed on a Leederville verge mid-morning (having come prepared with his own toilet roll) has 28 days to pay the fine.

Vincent CEO Len Kosova says his staff formally advised Swan Taxis to hand over the driver’s personal details so he could be fined under the health act and the litter act. If it had refused to comply, the company could have been fined, and corporate penalties are much stiffer.

Meanwhile, Suresh Rajan from the WA ethnic communities council has backed calls from Taxi Industry Forum WA chief Howard Lance for more training to explain the unacceptability of this kind of thing in Australia.

He says training’s most effective when it comes from a figure within the driver’s own community.

“Imagine there’s 15 Indian boys sitting there and a cop comes in telling them about acceptable culture,” he says, adding that in India many distrust police due to a culture of bribery.

“You need to get community elders to do the training, because these boys will listen to community elders, they won’t listen to white cops.”

Originally from India, he points out that pooing in public isn’t really a part of sub-continental ”culture”, more a grudgingly accepted necessity as so few have ready access to toilets.

“It would be a very simple process to train the person to say this is unacceptable in this society,” he says.

Mr Rajan says cultural misunderstandings are more common with workers who are here temporarily, than with long-termers who’ve put down roots.

“The old Sikh drivers who’ve been driving for 30 or 40 years, they treat their car with immense respect, they treat the job as something they’re proud to be involved with. Then there’s the new ones who treat it as a means to an end.”

With 93 per cent of cab drivers in Perth hailing from non-English speaking backgrounds, training needs to be on both sides, he suggests: for drivers to understand norms here, and for the department and companies to understand where drivers are coming from and why they’d be more open to intra-community training rather than lectures.

by DAVID BELL