Page 1940 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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Senior management and Strategic Finance have limited visibility of the activities performed within the Department and the costs of undertaking them.
Further:
TAMS has yet to clearly articulate the alignment between its core business activities, government’s policy priorities, its service delivery objectives, the indicators needed to monitor service delivery performance against these objectives and the supporting financial budgeting.
And:
In order to manage the risk of developing services at financial expenditure which exceeds budget, TAMS needs to institutionalise a culture of fiscal restraint.
These problems point to poor leadership and no desire to improve.
The ACTION authority is a prime example of a part of the ACT government failing to meet its targets despite large sums of money being spent. Page 113 of budget paper 4 of the 2010-11 documents paints a sorry tale of the state of play within the bus network. We saw the timeliness of ACTION services slip again to 82 per cent. Of course, as was discussed in committees here at the Assembly last year, this figure only represents what time the buses leave the depot, not the timeliness of their services en route. We also see in the budget that the customer satisfaction indicator has fallen to 80 per cent.
Perhaps most disappointing of all for this government that prides itself on environmental sustainability, with public transport being an important pillar of that platform, is the fact that, rather than the modal share increasing, it has decreased by 5 per cent and ACTION patronage has fallen by 801,000. In fact, there were 1.33 million fewer customers boarding ACTION buses than was the target. We also saw the cost per vehicle kilometre increase to $4.13, and the total cost per passenger boarding increased significantly to $6.30.
The percentage of operations ACTION receives from fares is now just 20.1 per cent. There is little which is sustainable about that. Yet, in spite of these poor figures, ACTION employed around 60 more full-time equivalent staff than targeted. The question has to be asked: are Canberrans happy with the bus service they are getting for the fares and the $76 million subsidy?
The budget for the rest of TAMS does not describe a rosy affair. Canberrans are suffering from years of neglected infrastructure and failure to properly invest in our future. Only the Canberra Liberals have a plan to get Canberra’s infrastructure and infrastructure delivery back on track.
The percentage of roads in good condition has slipped to 88 per cent. Furthermore, the government only managed to resurface about half of the roads they were meant to in 2009-10. This year, Canberrans sent more waste per capita to landfill. While the ACT government claim to be committed to a no-waste city, their predictions are for a
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