Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 10 February 2017

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Defend taxi families from criminal Uber fraud!

Why are Australian governments legalising a small-business-destroying multinational predator funded by the same Saudi dictatorship that funds al-Qaeda terrorists?

The desperate taxi and car hire owners who will blockade Melbourne’s Bolte Bridge on Monday are victims of a multinational predator whose business operation is in breach of many laws, including Australia’s Trade Practices Act.

The 7 December 2016 issue of the CEC’s Australian Alert Service exposed this predator in a feature article entitled “Uber-parasite”. (Click here to order a free copy of this issue of the AAS.)

As the article reveals:

Uber, the multinational ride-sharing company based on a clever but devious app (look up surge-pricing), is the poster-boy of so-called “disruption”. It sells itself as new technology that disrupts businesses based on old technology, like the car disrupting the horse-drawn wagon industry. However it isn’t fundamentally new technology—like existing taxis it still depends on a car, a driver and a customer—it is merely an app that allows the company to get around the laws regulating taxi services, which ensure safety, reliability and continuity of service. Taxi license owners have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars—in Victoria up to $500,000—to operate their businesses in compliance with the laws.

Uber cannot compete with taxis! It has never made a profit and operates worldwide at a massive loss of around US$2 billion per annum—the biggest losses in the history of such “tech start-ups”. These monster losses are being borne by Uber’s investors, which include Google and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

(The Saudis’ US$3.4 billion investment should be a huge scandal: they love Uber because it fits well with their extremist Wahhabi culture that bans women from driving, so more than 80 per cent of Uber’s customers are women; Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, who last year joined Uber’s international advisory board to represent her country’s investment, is the daughter of Prince Bandar and his wife Princess Haifa, who are both named in the 2002 US Congressional Joint Inquiry Report on 9/11, for having personally funded Saudi agents who assisted al-Quaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attack.)

In order to make a profit, Uber would have to quadruple its prices. However, knowing that nobody would use their service if they charged that much, Uber is pursuing a global strategy of wearing losses long enough to wipe out existing taxi operations, so it can then jack up its prices to make a profit, free from competition.

This is called predatory pricing, which is illegal under the Trade Practices Act.

And this is where questions must be raised about the actions of governments and regulators, because they have done nothing to enforce the law. Why?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which enforces the Trade Practices Act, has not taken action against Uber’s predatory pricing. But it gets much worse: last year former ACCC chairman Professor Allan Fels joined Uber’s international advisory board!

Australia’s state governments, which regulate taxi services, have rushed to legalise Uber. They have also dealt existing taxi businesses a death-blow by gutting the value of their licenses, which will force many small businesses out of the industry. This rush to boost Uber at the expense of people who have invested in the industry for decades is extremely suspicious: as no company can sustain losses of the scale of Uber’s indefinitely, are some politicians rushing to help Uber get a legal foothold in Australia before it otherwise burns through its investors’ dough and has to fold? If so, what’s in it for them?

(Australia is full of examples of politicians who pushed certain policies and reforms, such as privatisation for instance, while in elected office and then went to work for the private companies that profited massively from those reforms.)

Politicians of all parties—the Liberals, the ALP, the Greens, the idiotic Sex Party in Victoria—all blithely dismiss as merely economic “disruption” the carnage that they are allowing to happen to thousands of families who operate small taxi and car-hire businesses around Australia. Therefore, those desperate families feel forced to stage protests such as the blockade of the Bolte Bridge on Monday to remind the public what “disruption” feels like.

Australians must not let hard-working families be destroyed by a criminal fraud. Don’t fall for the theoretical economic justifications such as “disruption”. Since Hawke and Keating such fraudulent justifications have been used to deregulate and privatise Australia to industrial death. Instead, demand politicians and regulators enforce the law, and support your local industries!

Click here for a free copy of the 7 December 2016 Australian Alert Service featuring "Uber-parasite".

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