Two driving jobs, seven days a week. Granted.
- Occupation
- Truck driver weekdays, van driver weekends
- Court
- Auckland District Court
- Disqualification reason
- 100 demerit points — three-month suspension
- Challenges
- Two employers, seven days, 65 hours a week, a fleet of vehicles, and a wide boundary
- Outcome
- Application granted
What he was facing
Hemi drives for a living twice over. Trucks Monday to Friday, then a van on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Both jobs are real jobs, and he needs both incomes.
In August he reached 100 demerit points and was served with a three-month suspension starting within days.
Losing his licence didn't mean losing one job. It meant losing two.
He had actually contacted us a month earlier and decided not to proceed, because he didn't have the money at the time. When the suspension notice arrived he came back, and we set the fee up as four instalments over eight weeks so cost wasn't the thing that stopped him.
Why it was difficult
A limited licence is designed to be restrictive. The court's instinct is to grant the narrowest licence that relieves the hardship — one job, one vehicle, a tight set of hours, a small geographic area.
Hemi needed close to the opposite of that:
- Seven days a week. Police will often push for a licence capped at five or six days, which would have cost him one of the two jobs outright.
- 65 hours of driving a week. At the top end of what a limited licence realistically covers.
- A whole fleet, not one vehicle. His main employer needed him able to drive any truck on the yard, not a single nominated rego.
- A boundary covering most of greater Auckland — out to Waimauku in the north-west, Dairy Flat in the north and Bombay in the south.
Ask for too little and the licence is useless. Ask for too much and the court refuses it. The whole application turned on landing between those two.
What we did
We stress-tested it before he paid. He asked upfront whether two jobs across seven days was even viable. Rather than take the fee and find out later, we told him plainly where the difficulty would be, worked through his actual rostered hours and vehicle types to understand his situation fully, and only then said it was achievable.
We built the hardship case around dependence on both incomes — not “he'd like to keep the weekend job”, but that the household budget doesn't work without it.
We took his employer's requirements into the application rather than around them — the full fleet and the extended boundary, drafted so they read as necessary rather than convenient.
We recommended the court. The application was filed in Auckland Central rather than the court closest to him, because Manukau was running slowly and he was already suspended. That single decision probably saved him a fortnight off the road.
The outcome
Police failed to provide their views in a timely manner. Once they'd exceeded the time allowed to respond, we pushed the court to allocate the next available date rather than let the file sit — and the application was granted.
It took under three weeks from first enquiry to a licence covering two jobs, seven days, 65 hours a week and a fleet of vehicles.
“Just wanted to say thank you again for all your help with getting the limited licence sorted. I really appreciate everything you've done throughout the process.”
— Hemi
What this case shows
“My driving needs are too big for a limited licence” is one of the most common reasons people don't apply. Sometimes it's true. Often it just means the application has to be built carefully enough to justify what's being asked for.
