Page 214 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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Papers
Mr Barr presented the following paper:
Occupational Health and Safety Act, pursuant to section 228—Operation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 1989 and its associated law—Second quarterly report for the period 1 October to 31 December 2006.
Mr Corbell presented the following papers:
Petitions—Out-of-order
ACTION buses—Timetable changes—Difficulty to bus users—Dr Foskey (1111 signatures).
Ngunawal Protest—Petitioned name change of Ngunawal Lands to Ngambri Lands—Mr Berry (23 signatures).
ACTION bus service—timetable changes
Statement by member
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo): I seek leave to make a brief statement in relation to the out-of-order petition concerning timetable changes to ACTION bus services.
Leave granted.
DR FOSKEY: The petition just tabled was coordinated by one woman alone, Ms Carmel Kinsella, who is a constituent in Ainslie. Ms Kinsella is not normally a politically active constituent but was so concerned about the ACT government’s changes to the ACTION bus timetables that she went out, time and time again, during the summer heat and collected the 1,111 signatures to this petition, which requests the ACT government to return the ACTION bus timetable to its pre-December state. Ms Kinsella chose to hand her petition to the ACT Greens because she knew that we had already spoken about the impact of the changes.
I congratulate Ms Kinsella on her hard work. I note that she is sitting in the chamber today. I thank her for following up and seeing the completion of the work that she has done. It all goes to show that people in the community will not just sit and suffer when changes are made which affect their ability to get to work or to go to medical appointments, especially when those services were already only just good enough, which was the state of the public transport system prior to the budget cuts.
My office has received numerous constituent complaints over the last three months. I have tried to pass these on to the Minister for the Territory and Municipal Services. These constituents, Ms Kinsella and the signatories to this petition, feel concerned that Canberra residents who do not work from 9.00 to 5.00 nor catch peak-time buses are being treated like second-class citizens because they are not being adequately catered for by the ACT government’s public transport services.
A number of these constituents are elderly and rely on the buses to get to medical and specialist appointments. As specialist appointments can take several months to get and
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