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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 3992 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

On that sort of track record, Mr Speaker, I would remind Mr Whitecross that this is my sixth election coming up. Five down and one to go. I will be successful. What is Mr Whitecross's record? He got up once, full stop. We will see the proof of that in February. It is obvious that Mr Whitecross does not want to get re-elected. He would not be pulling this sort of funny trick if he did.

He talked about the vicious attack by the Government on ACTION over the last three years. I would point out, Mr Speaker, that what we were doing with ACTION for the first couple of years was exactly a continuation of what the Labor Government did for five years. If it was vicious over the last three years, how come it was not vicious in the five years before that, when the Labor Party was doing exactly the same thing? He might as well have said that Mr Connolly was vicious, too. I do not think Mr Connolly was, and I do not think we are. That is just to deal with a couple of the strange comments that Mr Whitecross made.

Mr Speaker, the motion begins with some notion about condemning the Government for degrading the bus service. Frankly, we have not degraded the bus service, and Mr Whitecross put nothing on the table as evidence that we have. What we have been doing, as I say, is a continuation of what Labor did. We have sought to ensure that our public transport system keeps pace with the efficiency improvements and meets the community's needs, which is exactly what Terry Connolly tried to do for the last three or four years of his term in this place. When I came into the ministry in January, it was pretty obvious that there was some loss of public confidence in the system. There were some problems with that. I was getting lots of telephone calls and lots of letters, just as Mr Whitecross and others were. But I wanted to ensure that we embarked on some real improvements and made some changes in ACTION services that were beneficial. I am not one to sit in my office and direct change without having the facts first. Mr Whitecross does not seem to have suffered from that at all. He does not go and get any facts; he just attacks.

I wanted to know first what was wrong with ACTION. I initiated the review by Roger Graham in February. Within three weeks of coming into the ministry, Mr Speaker, I had acted to find out what it was that was wrong with ACTION, because, if you do not know what is wrong, how on earth can you fix it? Mr Whitecross thinks you can fix it, I presume, by sitting in your office and directing change, without first of all knowing what the problem is. My objective was to identify the problems and then set about fixing them. I think that is what we are doing, Mr Speaker.

I tabled the Graham report only in June of this year, just over three months ago. That report outlined some major changes that it recommended the Government adopt. This Government made a commitment to implement those recommendations. We indicated that a number of those measures would be taken this year and that some would run into next year, because of the very nature of the changes that were proposed. Incidentally, that report was endorsed by this Assembly and by Mr Whitecross. He did not get up and say that he objected to the report, that he did not like the recommendations or that he did not like the implicit timescale for implementing what Mr Graham recommended.

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