Page 5157 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009

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government have had a long time to get things right—a long time, Mr Stanhope, to put some real effort into making our public transport better, not worse. As my colleague Mr Coe has so eloquently stated, it is now November 2009, and for the Greens to claim Redex as part of achieving the terms of their agreement is very shallow, and it certainly shows that the Greens are not willing to be a third force in ACT politics and are nothing more than an appendage of this Stanhope Labor government.

Mr Coe also pointed out that the Labor Party and the Greens agreement shows that they are not even interested in Gungahlin commuters—

Mr Stanhope: What have the Greens done? You’ve upset the Liberals today. What have you done?

MR DOSZPOT: No, Mr Stanhope—not even interested in Gungahlin commuters—and you are not interested in, and there is no commitment to, park and ride or bike and ride in Gungahlin as part of the agreement,

How can the Greens claim to be part of the environment and integrated transport if they cannot even make the simple commitment required for Gungahlin commuters? I commend Mr Coe’s motion to the Assembly.

MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (11.15), by leave: My brief comment is on Mr Coe’s second speech, which basically shows he clearly has not been a bus user, because the most frustrating thing is when you stand there and you have missed the bus. Frequency does really matter with bus services, and that is one of the things that the Redex system will deliver. Frequency matters if you are a catcher of public transport, Mr Coe.

MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.15), by leave: Ms Le Couteur may well say that I am not a regular bus user. I would like to know when she last caught a bus. I caught a bus on Friday last week and the 51 and 52 services are not so crash hot. They are the ones that I get from Nicholls. And I can tell you what is more frustrating than waiting for a bus. It is getting off a bus that is going to your destination, waiting for a bus to then get on a bus that is going to the same destination—and it being 21, 13, 11, 20, 11, five, five, nine, three, nine or four minutes slower. That is more frustrating. That is far more frustrating than waiting for a bus. We are not talking about 15-minute buses from your suburb, from your actual start of journey. We are talking about 15-minute intervals for a bus in the middle of your journey, which you should not be getting, because it is going to be slower anyway.

So Ms Le Couteur’s additional comments were not terribly useful. If she actually analysed the 727 and the Gungahlin bus timetables, she might understand that the Redex service is not all it is meant to be.

MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.17): I thank Mr Coe for bringing this motion forward today. What Mr Coe has done through his very detailed analysis of this new service and this new trial is show that the emperor has no clothes. We have got a government that like to give flashy names to things, like Redex. They


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