Page 2772 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009

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Another concern that I have with the budget papers is listed on page 73 of budget paper No 3. It lists appropriations that are incredibly broad: additional funding for municipal services and additional repairs and maintenance. It is $7 million—quite a large amount of money. To simply say that there is $7 million for additional work I think is really treating the taxpayers with contempt. This is the taxpayers’ money. The taxpayers are working hard to give money to this government, and for them simply to leave it unaccounted for in this budget as they have in budget paper No 3 is quite inappropriate.

In conclusion, the TAMS budget is a failure of this government to learn the lessons of the past. The TAMS budget is not a trophy of local government. It is not a trophy of things that the community can point to as local infrastructure. Instead it is a litany of errors, a litany of disasters and a litany of waste. We hope that the government will improve on this budget next year. We hope that the money will be better spent in future years.

MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (9.11): My comments are about transport generally and ACTION. One of the measures of progress in terms of an integrated and less car dependent transport plan is the level of investment in transport-related infrastructure, particularly looking at how much is going into public transport, cycling and pedestrian infrastructure as against general road funding.

After a couple of years of lower proportional investment in non-car infrastructure, the next two years return more or less to the 25 per cent proportion of previous years. The Greens would like to see a plan put in place to increase the proportion of investment in bus priority lanes, cycleways, park-and-ride facilities and bus interchanges. Holding level with our investment strategy of the past is not good enough.

One of the recommendations of the joint house committee inquiry into the NCA was that the national capital plan be amended to incorporate an overarching sustainable transport plan. The Greens would like to see the ACT government agitate for progress on that amendment, as it could provide a framework for regional transport linking Queanbeyan, the airport and Yass, Goulburn and Sydney with transport plans in Canberra.

The budget does not provide a clearly articulated vision for transport at a regional level or a strong commitment to transport infrastructure planning. In some ways this may be an inheritance of the past few years of neglect. We note and welcome the feasibility studies for two park-and-ride facilities. However, we want to be confident that two or three park-and-ride facilities will be under construction in the next year or so. And while there is some money going into bus priority lanes, the process appears to be driven by pressure on the roads, without a particular commitment to a regular level of investment or an overarching plan for where that investment should go.

We take the view that public awareness and current economic circumstances have coincided to create the opportunity to take a big leap on transport, but the time to act is now. This budget takes some important steps but it does so in a fairly disjointed way. The only way we can make this shift is to present it in the form of a big picture.


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