The Taxi industry is one of the clearest examples in Australia of how industry and regulators team up to rip off the public.
Before Premier Jeff Kennett regulated the taxi industry in Victoria, it was a (comparatively) competitive industry, with operators able to use price, service, availability, and cleanliness as points of difference from each other. As soon as regulations were introduced any incentive to do better, be cleaner, improve service or… basically do any real work for their money, disappeared overnight. Why would you go above and beyond when your prices are set by government, and you’re protected against competition so you know you’ll always be busy enough no matter what?
And the rot set in quickly, with taxis becoming synonymous with bad service, BO, poor communication skills, and high costs.
Regulators loved it because they got power, and millions of dollars in ‘licence’ fees. The taxi industry loved it too, because they were basically paying protection money to get a monopoly on the market. The losers? Us.
And the taxi industry dined out on our dollars for years. Until along came a spider… in the form of Uber, and suddenly they had some competition.
Unaccustomed as they are to actually having to compete for work, the taxi industry has been losing ground steadily to the newcomer, who quickly became known for being cheaper, cleaner, with better service, and actually knowing where they’re going. The difference between regulated markets and free markets (comparatively) couldn’t be clearer.
But suddenly the government is left with a dilemma… the public are all on Ubers side and there’s a huge public desire to see them free to operate, but they’ve been taking protection money from the taxi industry for decades and they can’t turn their back on them now! So what to do?
Well we got a clue as to their plans today when a document about ‘legalizing’ Uber was leaked. The plan? To hand over $150,000 of taxpayers funds to each taxi licencee, and slug us with a $1 per trip fee to ‘pay’ for it. In other words, the taxi industry wins again, the regulators get off scott free… and who are the losers? Oh, right, it’s us. Again.
They tried a similar stunt in NSW, and thanks to public outcry including a video involving yours truly:
They had to wind the compensation back to a fraction of what was originally planned.
So it’s time to kick up a fuss. Again. It’s not ok that taxpayers and transport users are going to be slugged again to ‘compensate’ the taxi industry which has been gleefully ripping us off (with help from the regulators) for decades. If anyone deserves compensation, it’s us! We’ve been paying more than we needed to for years because the government couldn’t say no to some easy money from a lazy industry who wanted ‘protection’.
Enough. Taxi drivers aren’t losing anything they actually deserve. They can keep driving, they can keep offering a service in return for money, just like Uber, and there’s nothing to stop them continuing to make lots of money in the future. Remember, this $150,000 doesn’t ‘buy them out’, it doesn’t mean they have to stop driving… it’s just money in their hand. Just like the money we’ve been forced to hand over to them for decades thanks to regulated fares in return for restricted taxi numbers.
I’m fed up. I’m sick of it. I’ve been ripped off enough for one lifetime and I’m not going to sit by while they do it again.
No compensation for taxi licenses!
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Do you have any idea at all just how much money people forked out to buy those licences in the first place? That they invested in these licences for future plans/retirement? That people are now left with huge amounts of debt for something that is now worth nothing, & none of that is their fault. It would be just like if you borrowed $400K from a bank to purchase a property & then you were told that it is now worth nothing & you get nothing for it, but you still have that debt. I don’t agree that tax payers should foot any bill for compensation (it’s not their fault either), but the government certainly needs to pony up some money for these people who are now facing financial ruin. 9 times out of 10 it is not what you refer to as the “lazy cab driver” who is left in the lurch, it is some mother, father, family, etc who thought they were investing in something solid for their future but generally speaking have nothing to do with the industry as a whole. I think you need to do some more research before carrying on like a pork chop & plastering the internet with this drivel.
Hi Lauren, yes I do. I know a few of the licence owners personally, and they are as unimpressed with my views on this as you are!
What they failed to consider when they ‘invested’ is that they weren’t buying anything of actual value, what they were buying was the ‘licence’ to do something that had been stolen from the rest of us, namely, the right to use our vehicle to make money if we want to. That right was taken from all of us, and then sold back to the few willing or able to pay for it. We ALL lost out as a result. Taxis became harder to find, more expensive, and service levels and cleanliness suffered, because operators knew they could get away with bad service, BO, dirty seats, and a poor sense of direction because… well, where else were people going to go?
There’s a saying, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas’. I’m sorry to say that anyone who has traded in Taxi ‘licences’ has been lying down with dogs, or doing a deal with the Devil, or pick whatever euphemism you prefer, they were trading in rights stolen from the rest of us, to participate in a government run protection racket that screwed the rest of us over.
Then along came UBER. And suddenly we could see just how bad we had it. UBERs service was better, the cars were cleaner, the drivers communicated well and were polite, they offered us water and mints and chargers for our phones… and best of all they knew where they were going. Oh, I forgot to mention they were CHEAPER too. Consumers have overwhelmingly voted with their feet and wallets for UBER, for all of the above reasons.
So whilst I feel bad for the often good and hard-working people who bought the taxi licences, they should never have participated in the cartel behavior that is the taxi licencing game in the first place. And most importantly of all right now, they do not deserve to be paid out by taxpayers after they’ve profited from our pain for decades. They made a deal with the Devil, now the Devil wants out of the deal because the politics has turned against him. That feeling of being screwed which taxi licence owners are objecting to? That’s the same feeling of being screwed that every Victorian has felt whenever we’ve been unable to find a taxi (licences were deliberately kept scarce, that was part of the ‘deal’), suffered bad service and BO (why would they bother being nice if they know we have no choice?) and paid extortionate rates for a short trip across town. Welcome to the club, don’t expect sympathy.
The lesson? Don’t deal in the stolen property of others, not even when the government is the dealer.
“I don’t agree that tax payers should foot any bill for compensation (it’s not their fault either), but the government certainly needs to pony up some money”
This sentence sums up the current problems our country is facing quite well. The government doesn’t have any money, the government is an administrative body to allocate our money, that we as a society have agreed to mutually spend together. If you don’t think that tax payers should foot any bill for compensation, that’s it. End of story. There is no other magic pool of funds for the government to redistribute, it’s either your money they spend, or its no money.