Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the concerns of taxi drivers and taxi owners as well as hire car operators and owners in my electorate whose livelihoods are being put at risk through the continued unlawful operation of ride-sharing service UberX. Despite what the hip marketing campaign of Uber wants people to believe, they are wilfully operating outside of Victoria's laws and regulations. They do not conduct police checks on their drivers, they are not meeting their Australian taxation obligations and they are being quite upfront about their intention to flout the law until the government changes it to suit their needs. This is not a situation the community or government would accept or acquiesce to in any other industry. Yet the inaction by both the former and the current Victorian state governments has the taxi drivers and private hire car operators feeling left out in the cold. They are paying thousands of dollars for licence fees and insurance while UberX drivers rob them of business, pay no GST, pay no licence fees and are not properly insured. This is not simply disruptive technology; there are apps that allow you to easily book taxis. This is simply, up and down, unfair competition.

I understand that there are currently more than 4,500 UberX drivers in Victoria. To put that in perspective, there are currently 5,797 registered taxis in Victoria being driven by 15,351 registered taxi drivers. It is already incredibly difficult to make a living as a taxi driver. They are some of the lowest paid workers in our community. They need to work long and unsociable hours to make ends meet. They face genuine risk to their personal safety, often from drunken violence on Friday and Saturday nights in Melbourne. Spend some time on King Street after midnight and you will eventually see some drunken low-life hurling racial abuse and banging his fist on a cab. While UberX drivers are out on the road operating illegally and without the burden of regulation taxi fees, taxi drivers are losing income.

My electorate is home to not only many taxi drivers—and I suspect some UberX drivers—but also many people who worked and saved for years to buy their own taxi licences. They have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to successive Victorian governments for the right to operate in a strictly regulated environment on a level playing field. In many cases these investments are for people's retirement, legitimately earned through decades of hard graft. UberX is not the same as other disruptive technologies. This is not like the slow death of the local video store due to the take-up of digital download and streaming services—a transition, as sad as it was for video store operators and their employees, which took place in a genuinely competitive environment without laws being broken or circumvented. One of my constituents, George Kapnias, owner of Southern Cross Hire Cars, one of Victoria's largest private hire car services, wrote to me:

Ridesharing is not a revolutionary concept. It is simply a marketing term. Ridesharing is exactly what the Industry has been doing for years. That is, providing the travelling public with transport on a commercial basis.

George also correctly states:

If the costs of compliance were totally removed from existing hire car and Taxi operators (including licencing, insurances, driving certificates etc), the Industry would be able to provide a more cost competitive service and negate the massive cost disparities enjoyed by UberX.

But they cannot, and that is the real reason UberX is such a problem for taxis. It is not the technology or a revolutionary idea killing their business; it is the huge multinational that refuses to play by the rules until the rules are changed to suit its needs. No other business would be able to generate this or expect it. And why should they? Taxi owners bought their licences from the government. They were sold a product by the Victorian government, at a price set by the government and with the value of the product determined by the government. And they operate in a regulatory environment determined by the government. The Victorian government needs to deal with this issue as quickly as possible. They cannot keep putting it off. UberX has demonstrated how quickly it can grow. It is simply not fair to allow these people's livelihoods to be rapidly destroyed. I do not want anyone's livelihood to be destroyed; I do not want UberX's drivers to be destroyed. I just want them to be operating in the same field that taxi operators are operating in.

I do not have the answer to the problem, but I certainly know that people in the industry are prepared to work with the state government to find a resolution to this issue—one that does not see everybody out of work. But it is as clear as day that further inaction will leave the taxi and hire car industries decimated—something I do not want to see in my electorate, which is home, as I said, to numerous individuals who hold taxi licences and where Southern Cross cars operates and where Yellow Cabs has operated for many years. These are legitimate businesses, and their concerns should be heard.