03/09/2026
There is a lot to unpack in today’s article about Uber.
Uber is cutting around 3,300 jobs globally, with Australian employees expected to be impacted.
At the same time, more than 100,000 people drive or deliver for Uber in Australia, and the company has committed more than US$10 billion to autonomous vehicles and robotaxis over the coming years.
For those of us who lived through Uber’s arrival in Australia, there is an uncomfortable sense of history repeating itself.
I spent years fighting what happened to the taxi and hire car industry, and I make no apology for still carrying the scars from that fight.
Uber entered the Australian market illegally. Governments and regulators stood by while it built enormous market share, ignoring laws that taxi and hire car operators had spent decades complying with.
The consequences were devastating.
People lost businesses and life savings. Families who had borrowed against their homes or invested their retirement savings into taxi licences saw the value of those assets collapse. There was enormous financial hardship, but there was also an emotional and human cost that I don’t believe has ever been properly acknowledged.
We saw it firsthand.
Those of us who lived through it still carry the scars.
We carry those scars because federal and state governments failed us. They failed to enforce the rules, allowed enormous disruption to occur and ultimately left ordinary people and their families carrying the financial and emotional cost.
Those scars haven’t disappeared. Time hasn’t changed what happened or the damage it caused.
More than 100,000 Australians drive or deliver for Uber. Uber calls them contractors. I’ve always believed they are employees without the benefits of being employees.
Australians are now spending billions of dollars through these platforms, and those billions are going back to billionaire investors offshore.
And now comes the next disruption.
Uber is investing more than US$10 billion in autonomous vehicles and robotaxis.
Nobody can say exactly how many Australian driving jobs will ultimately disappear, or how quickly. Nor do we know the impact of potentially thousands of driverless vehicles entering our already congested cities.
These are questions governments should be asking now, not after the technology has arrived.
I don’t believe we can stop technology, nor should we try.
But surely we should have learnt something from what happened last time.
Like before, we don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s coming.
We couldn’t predict exactly how Uber would change the industry a decade ago, but the warning signs were there. Governments chose not to act until enormous damage had already been done.
The warning signs are there again.
My fear is that governments will make the same mistakes. Wait until the disruption has happened, hold inquiries, change regulations and talk about transition after people have already paid the price.
We should have learnt from the first time. We don’t need a crystal ball. We need to act before the damage is done.
