Page 614 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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The appropriate place for that, where there can be input from the community and that input from the community can be passed on to the Assembly in an undoctored way, is through the planning and environment committee which has been set up to have responsibility for oversight of the public transport system and the accompanying issues in relation to the environment. Therefore, this motion attempts to refer to the planning and environment committee an investigation into the operation of public transport in the ACT.
It is a long time since, and there probably never has been, a full examination of the public transport system by a committee of this Assembly. In the last Assembly there was an inquiry into the operation of the taxi industry, and it had some concomitant terms of reference in relation to sustainable transport. But there has not been a proper investigation of the operation of public transport by any committee of this place for a very long time, if at all.
It has now become very important that we look at the operation of public transport, in particular in relation to the operation of ACTION buses, because there is now a very live debate in the community that ACTION buses, the principal mode of public transport in this territory, are failing to meet the needs of the public. There are a number of issues that underpin that.
Since the changes that were introduced in relation to ACTION buses in the last budget, when it was decorporatised, I have expressed my concern at the inappropriately long chain of command between the people running ACTION buses and the minister responsible. The fact that ACTION buses is now in a silo inside the Department of Territory and Municipal Services, rather than a freestanding authority, means that we have lost a lot of expertise, and people have resigned from the service, as I predicted they might, as we have seen in other areas where the organisation has been decorporatised and subsumed into intertwined departments.
There is a matter of grave concern that people feel that they are no longer operating a bus company and that they are operating a bureaucracy. There are issues of governance and the administrative functions of how ACTION buses operate which have a real impact on the provision of services in the ACT.
Then we have the desire of the government to cut back expenditure on buses, which has resulted in a new and very unfortunate timetable. Part way through last week in the Assembly, we started a motion on the operation of the timetable. Although that matter has not been concluded, the minister signalled his intention not to take any notice of the desire of many in the community by circulating an amendment, which was the usual Labor Party stunt: “We will take out all words after ‘that’ and replace them with our own”—which basically praised the operation of ACTION buses—“Because we are the government and we have the numbers, we can.”
But we have to take into account that public transport is a vital community service. It is a vital community service because, as I have said in this place before, more than 50 per cent of Canberrans do not have direct access to private transport; they do not drive. Because of their age, they are too young or, as Mr Mulcahy talked about, as people get older they wean themselves out of their cars and they need a proper public
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