I wonder who is going to profit from this one.

It looks remarkably like a repeat of the dairy industry to me.

You know the one, dairy farmers bought a quota, for quite high prices, to supply a certain amount of 'drinking" milk for a known reasonable price. Any milk above the quota was supplied at a heavily discounted price, as manufacturing milk.

Price was controlled through to the retail outlet, & all involved made a reasonable living.

This system was torn down. Farmers lost a great chunk of their investment, & the value of their farms crashed. Their farm gate price dropped to about cost of production, but retail price actually went up. Coles & Woolworths made a killing, & dairy farmers killed themselves.

This looks the same. Unintended consequences will be the result. The cost of running a taxi will skyrocket, fares will increase standards, will fall & numbers of taxis will fall. I have not looked who, but someone is about to make a killing. I wonder who.

Hasbeen

As I'm in Queensland I'm not completely up to speed with the situation
in Victoria however I understand its quite similar to here. We currently have two taxi companies, one of which can only be described as extremely interesting & the other only slightly less so. Both have systematically acquired every cab licence & put a few back on the market at crazy prices, albeit not quite as much so as in Victoria. Mind you the local companies have few other tricks too, which ensure that company owned cars get the majority of halfway profitable work, leaving the dregs to the privateers. Given the utterly ridiculous cost of licences, at least 50% of fares is devoted to the cost of the licence. After the company takes its slice & the car owner gets their bit, there isn't a lot left for drivers who are lucky if they take home $10 per hour for a normal 12 hour day. Out of that they pay GST from the first dollar (none of this $75,000 stuff that applies to everyone else in the country), they pay their own income tax, superannuation, holiday pay, sick leave & everything else normally included in a pay packet. Many also pay 50% of the fuel used & a contribution to vehicle insurance.

Whilst the Victorian move will undoubtedly hurt individual licence owners, I suspect it will be much more onerous on cab companies which have profiteered off licences for so long. Those grubs definitely needed to be squashed. Only recently there was another related decision to cut the fees raked off by Cabcharge, another bottom-feeding organization with tentacles spread across all cab companies in Australia & into other industries as well. There isn't anything remotely nice one could say about the 'ethics' of that company.

to be continued

continued

This won't be the last we've heard of cab companies, no doubt there has been a lot of midnight oil burned in high-priced legal offices with talks about legal challenges. As far as I'm aware however, there isn't any binding contractual arrangement whereby the 'value' of licences is guaranteed ... whether or ot the smartest legal minds in the country can somehow construe some form of obligation to licence 'owners' on the part of the gubmunt will be the crux of the issue.

It is sad that some quite innocent people will lose money that they imagined was safe. But they were wrong. And anyone who thinks that any investment is risk-free needs to think again. The market is brutal, the world of business is brutal, competition is brutal, and that’s how it must be if we want to continue to increase prosperity, because that’s how we got to where we are now. Protection sends all of that into reverse. But invoking the competitive performance of the Kennett era raises a mystery. How come Jeff, reputedly the driving force behind past economic reform (and I mean the rational rather than the regressive kind) is currently railing against supposedly imported Irish ready-mixed bread dough? He ought to be supporting customer choice and business enterprise.

Hasbeen
A levy of 11c a litre was applied to milk to fund structural adjustment in the industry, so the price didn’t fall much immediately after deregulation in 2000. Farmers were helped to exit the industry. Since the levy was removed in 2009, the price of milk has fallen by 16.4%, while the general consumer price index rose by 10.8%.

Crapola
The cost of your taxi license has to be covered by the fares you charge. The regulator will set the price accordingly. What benefit does the passenger get from paying this additional cost?

"The cost of your taxi license has to be covered by the fares you charge. The regulator will set the price accordingly. What benefit does the passenger get from paying this additional cost?"
Another ill informed consumer I suspect. A taxi works 24/7 therefore your comment is negated, yes it is covered, but, and there is a large but here, drivers constantly take fares by spruiking and not turning on the meter...this is standard practise and approximately 30% of their takings are not noted on the meter. The passenger DOES NOT pay extra for anything it is a fare structure that is set by the Victorian Taxi Directorate a government body, therefore your argument is mute and negated. It astounds me that nobody can see the bigger picture here, and if you think there must be casualties in business, more the fool you. Place your money in the bank and do what they did in Europe and lose 25% of it's value directly to the government, but then again people like yourself live from pay check to pay check and you grandstand everyone who has worked to increase wealth. Shame on you.