Dear Members of the Victorian Legislative Council, I am writing on behalf of my mother and father, who are the owners of a Victorian taxi licence.
I am not certain if you will bother to read this, but I thought as we are meant to have a democracy in Australia, that I would give it a try. My cynicism in this matter stems from the fact that for the past two years we have been writing letters, attending meetings and imploring the lawmakers of this land to at least listen to our perspective and all to no avail. No one is listening and no one cares.
For some reason, all licence holders seem to have been portrayed as fat greedy parasites desirous of the status quo. I have heard phrases such as ‘The Greek Mafia’, which is particularly offensive to me and my family.
My parents arrived in Australia almost 50 years ago and have been working extremely hard ever since. They have never stolen anything and never broken any laws, yet in this instance they have been made to appear like leeches.
When they bought their taxi licence, the price was equal to that of a residential property. They took out a loan and worked endless hours, seven days a week to pay it off. They thought that ultimately, this would be their superannuation. Now they are in their 70s and the government, in one ‘Fell’ stroke is threatening to reduce all their hard work to nothing.
Did changes need to be made? Perhaps certainly. But there are other ways to improve the industry which do not involve punishing the very people who have in fact, through their own resources and hard work and legitimately and legally acquired assets, kept the industry going.
I never thought I would see the day when the Victorian state would strike at and destroy the assets of individuals. I think perhaps this is all one big joke to all politicians. Who cares after all about a few migrants? I wonder if any of you have ever seen or spoken to the people involved. If you have seen elderly people, from all backgrounds, weeping?
Yes, I am certain that you may have heard from or seen people responding in anger. How else might they be expected to respond when they have been ignored and vilified after they have sought to be heard through all legal channels? I met an elderly Australian gentleman at one of the many meetings I attended as a support to my father. He was sitting quietly as if in a state of shock and I approached him to ask if he was okay. His response to me was, ‘Forty years I worked as a driver to get my licence and now it’s all gone. My children’s inheritance, gone.’.
And the same applies to my parents, all that hard work, gone. Not gone truly, but rather, stolen. Stolen by a government who purports to support small business. Stolen through the opinion of an overpaid academic bureaucrat being accepted as pure fact by politicians who are too far removed from the lives and struggles of everyday Australians, that they will rely solely on a report and vote for the destruction of countless people’s livelihoods between morning tea and lunch in the parliamentary canteen. A mere blip in your day.
A horrible disregard of a lifetime’s work for my parents and many others.
Communist governments routinely seize the assets of their citizens. We do not have a Communist government here. If you are intending to destroy the value of licence holders’ assets, effectively taking away the value of a residential home, then at least have the decency and integrity to compensate them. And not do as you are in the process of doing now. Monopolising and taking over the entire industry and sitting quietly to watch it implode (no skin off your collective nose, right? No personal or financial loss to yourselves or those you love) and then building it all back from scratch, as has happened in other cities who have introduced similar changes in the recent past. Why do you waste taxpayers’ money in conducting such ‘inquiries’ when all you have to do is Google the information online and you will understand how reckless and thoughtless, utterly disrespectful, these proposed changes are. And after you have destroyed the industry, after a taxi licence is equal in value to a piece of toilet paper, future parliamentarians will call for another inquiry and another academic will be wheeled out of his ivory tower and the entire thing will begin again.
And in the meantime, my mother and father’s final years will be made terrible and difficult. Their new adopted country having finally showed them, ‘Who actually gives a crap about a few wogs anyway?’.
There are other ways to improve the system. Ways that do not destroy the livelihoods of taxi drivers and licence owners alike. I hope you will vote with your conscience. I hope you will vote with your mind and heart and not with your party. A political party is not a living entity, it is the individuals it contains which makes it in any way worthwhile and a vehicle for democracy.
Konstantina Vlahos, on behalf of Panagiota and Nikolaos Vlahos