Page 3070 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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education around the corner is imperative, because many of these people do not have transport to get their children to school. That is mainly courtesy of the Stanhope government, which has cut back transport services. It is extremely hard—and Dr Foskey made this point the other day—for people without a car to get to work.
It affects all sorts of people. There are people who are poor in a transitional way—people like students. They do not have a prospect of remaining poor for a long time, but while they are students they are poor. They cannot get around on public transport and they cannot get to their jobs because of the failure of the Stanhope government and its transport services.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella—Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Housing and Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (4.47): I want to briefly touch on something Mrs Dunne has raised. She says that young people cannot get to and from school very easily. We recognise that in the context of the bus service review. We need to put on the record, however, that 50 per cent of student travel to and from school is on ordinary route services; the other 50 per cent is on school bus services. We know that historically the school bus runs do not settle themselves down until mid-February, but they are revised in about November, depending on enrolment shifts.
The challenge before us is to make sure that the services provided to students travelling actually get them to the school on time and home again afterwards. We recognise that. That is why two initiatives have occurred. The first one is that we have reinstituted the committee which examines the school bus runs. Once upon a time—I think it was probably in Mr Stefaniak’s days as minister for education—there was a committee made up of the P&C councils, the schools and ACTION to examine the enrolment shift to make sure that those bus routes were responsive as much as possible. That committee ceased to exist some time ago. I have reinstituted that committee.
Secondly, the review of ACTION bus services and networking has taken into account the imperatives of people who are travelling who have no alternative but to travel by public transport. We accept that. We have had an unprecedented positive response—some negative, but unprecedented positivity—in helping us reconstruct a network. That has been to the extent where, when I was speaking to him just the other day, the network designer said that he wished to congratulate the government on the data that he had available to him in designing the new network. He had been involved with the Graham report. When the Graham report was commissioned, it was done with very little data. There was very little information from the travelling public, let alone from people who should travel and did not. That is always the most difficult question to answer. I am sure that Dr Foskey would appreciate this in an academic sense. It is very hard for us to work out why the public are not travelling on the bus. Unless they tell us exactly, we can only speculate, and that is not a very good basis on which to make decisions.
We also know—this is right across the country and across the world—that there is very little reliance on people who say, “Well, you know, if I had this service I would use it.” They actually do not. It is the difference between “would like” and “really need”. We have this conundrum.
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