Wednesday, 15 October 2025

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (18:57): (2008) My adjournment matter is for the Treasurer. In 2017 the government tore up the old taxi model. Licences that families had bought in order to shore up their future, often with mortgages, were cancelled, their values collapsed and many families were ruined. But to make it right the government put a new levy on every taxi and rideshare trip. We were told it had two jobs: to repay the families for the damage done and to cover the basic operating costs of the levy. But here is the context the public has not been given: the money never went to a special fund for compensation; it went into the general spending pool. They could have used that money to give fair compensation to the families destroyed, but they did not. They could have ended the levy once it served its purpose, but they did not. Instead it turns out that this government has lied about a huge surplus from this levy to make it look like it is necessary for it to continue, and they are using disabled people as a cover to do it.

The Treasury department reporting bundles a passenger fare discount for disabled Victorians into the system’s operating costs, but the Parliamentary Budget Office follows the law and strips that subsidy out because it is a disability program, not an operating cost, and their own words are the smoking gun. They say they exclude multipurpose taxi program payments from the cost of regulation because the MPTP existed before the Commercial Passenger Vehicle Industry Act 2017 and was not provisioned in the act. The government provides the MPTP through its disability programs.

This is an absolute disgrace. Disabled Victorians deserve proper support. They should not be used as a camouflage to continue a tax that was supposed to be for something entirely different. I call on the government to end this farce, stop exploiting disabled people and use the surplus to properly compensate the people that it was designed for.