Taxi and hire car owners rallied outside Victoria’s Parliament House – as well as Sydney, Brisbane and Perth – on Thursday, in a show of force against controversial rideshare service UberX.
The rally was undertaken by an estimated 10 per cent of the taxi workforce over the state government’s reluctance to outlaw UberX, which the industry says continues to operate outside a regulatory framework – primarily a failure to pay a $40,000 hire car operating fee.
Sandy Spanos from Victorian Taxi Families told Neos Kosmos the industry was not unfavourable to UberX, rather, it wants to ensure all operators are contributing equally.
“The only thing we want is a level playing field. We want the government to uphold the laws of the land. This is not against Uber or UberX or anyone else, what we’re saying is ‘uphold the laws’; if we have to work within a regulation framework, so should they.
“You can’t be asking the taxpayer to pay to keep a taxi on the road and some obscure person in the street pays nothing, that’s not right,” she said.
According to Spanos, the taxi industry pumps “$1.4 billion into state and federal coffers each and every year”, and employs over 50,000 people, but continued government inaction may lead to an industry collapse.
“The taxi industry has maybe another six months of survival and then we’ll go under, because we have no ability to compete when somebody pays nothing and we pay through the nose.”