Page 1742 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 6 June 2006
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Mr Pratt referred to the other 30. I guarantee to the house right now that all of those 30 will be non-transferable taxi licences. In fact, if the marketplace can sustain further licence plates after that and we are seeing an improvement in service, with no discernable loss in income for the actual operators, we will consider releasing more. But I guarantee to the house that they will be non-transferable licences. Any future new types of taxi licences may also be either transferable or non-transferable, according to the law, because we cannot remove the property of somebody retrospectively, which is why we have got the two types in the legislation.
The amendment will provide greater assurance that new taxi licences will not attract value and hence costs for the operators, as has occurred with standard taxi licences. The amendment will not affect taxi licences issued prior to the commencement of the amendment act; it is prospective.
The operator of a taxi service must not only hold a taxi licence for each taxi but must also be affiliated with the taxi network. The Road Transport (Public Passenger Services) Act 2001 provides two kinds of taxi network accreditation: accreditation of networks providing services to restricted taxis and accreditation of networks providing services to “taxis other than restricted taxis”. Further subcategories of network accreditation within these two types are also possible.
I acknowledge the work that the former Minister for Urban Services, Mr Smyth, did when the Liberals were in government, trying to sort this mess out. The frustration he must have felt is something that I share. We have no law in the ACT preventing another taxi network from setting up. Regardless of what we both tried so far, we could not get a second one to be viable in the town.
The legislation continues to allow various kinds of network accreditations. Networks may be able to refuse to affiliate people operating under the new types of taxi licences. We cannot have that. The amendments will simply require a taxi network to be accredited as a taxi network, and those networks will offer taxi dispatch services to taxi service operators regardless of the type of taxi licence the operator holds for the vehicles used in the taxi service. Any particular requirements that may need to be imposed on the networks providing services for certain kinds of taxis will be dealt with in regulation and under minimum service standards. These changes are particularly desirable in an environment where a single entity holds all ACT taxi network accreditations.
Several of the key aims of the government’s sustainable transport plan are to reduce transport costs, improve the reliability of public passenger services and improve the equity of access. More flexible taxi licensing arrangements have the potential to contribute to all these objectives.
The other main feature of the amendment bill is the relocation of enter-and-search powers and the regulation of primary legislation. Enter-and-search powers are currently contained in the Road Transport (Public Passenger Services) Regulation 2002 and the Road Transport (Vehicle Registration) Regulation 1999.
These changes, as Mr Pratt pointed out, are in response to the scrutiny of bills committee report No 6, dated 4 April 2005. The report raised concerns regarding the location within
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