The Vintage Classic Car Hirers Australia Association (VCCHA) was established by a group of 50 vintage and classic car service providers.  Providing chauffeur driven services in the wedding and events category.

As you may of seen in the news it was highly publicised that the WEDDINGS + EVENTS industry has been hard hit by COVID and this continues for us all.

Sadly this week all passenger transport service providers received an Authorisation Fee Notice 2019/2020 for $500, with the following clauses outlined on our notice.

Authorisation fees generally: For financial year 2019-2020, the authorisation fee is payable if you were an authorised service provider during the period of 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020, noting:
• The fee is based on the number of passenger service transactions that you carried out during the period.
• The fee is payable even if you did not carry out any passenger services. 

In the past many of us had expressed our concerns to Point to Point (P2P) about the fairness of this fee structure and how we had been categorised along with Taxi and Uber service providers, those of which taking many bookings per day, 1000's per year however some of us even prior to COVID were only carrying out 1-2 bookings per month.

Then obviously COVID hit, and hit the event industry hard, the majority of us on Job keeper to support us during this stressful period which has now concluded.  The above clause on our fee notice and we quote "The fee is payable even if you did not carry out any passenger services" - how is this fair???   Especially as we all know from March 2020 until late 2020 (where restrictions were still in place), we were unable to provide our services during this time due to COVID and the much publicised govt. restrictions on weddings and events.  

After receiving the fee notice, many of our members have made Phone calls to P2P to express their concerns and frustrations, the reaction seems to imply that its business as usual and business is back to normal, but this is far from the truth, as the event industry is still suffering from COVID and the ongoing reluctance of potential new clients making bookings due to the uncertainty of govt. restrictions and lockdowns, of which just occurred recently in Brisbane. 

Lockdowns around the country also affect NSW event planning as family and friends are travelling interstate to attend events, clients therefore still reluctant to book or are still postponing.  The ongoing effect for us all since COVID is that our clients have postponed and have taken up future prime dates on our future calendars which continues to affect our ongoing cashflow.

It’s fair to say that the niche transport category that we represent has been unfairly pigeon holed into the same category as taxi + Uber services who carry out multiple bookings a day.  This has never been our style of business and not fair we are being charged this levy when no bookings took place from March to late 2020.

What we would like to achieve here is a much fairer levy tier system recognising that many of us only do 1-20 events a year not 1000's.

Thank you for your consideration of our petition.

Please support our petition.