Page 1835 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011

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contend that not all the money being spent on transport is being spent in the right direction. The absence of a strategy makes it really hard to work out if it is going in the right direction. What seems to be a structural separation between the road building part of the government and the public transport part of the government makes it, without a strategy, even harder for the government to achieve any sort of rational program—I hesitate to use the word “strategy”—for transport delivery.

Some of the things the government is investing in we are positive about. As Mr Corbell says, we do like to say positive things about some of the things. The cycleways and the footpaths were part of the agreement. The government is putting additional money into buses. We are very happy to support that. We are happy to support the Belconnen Way where they have put in the bus priority lane. Some of the things that the government is doing are in the right direction, but a lot of them are not. The government is putting more of the ACT’s scarce resources into private cars—road-based transport.

I feel that the government ought to seriously do a transport strategy and look at the long-term impacts, particularly of peak oil. I know I harp on about peak oil a lot, but this is because it is a real problem. It is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse. Australia has been shielded from the impacts of increasing oil prices in the last six months as our dollar has gone up to $1.10 compared with the US dollar. But it is not going to keep on like this. The high oil prices are going to hit the Australian community. It is going to become abundantly obvious that we need to have a transport strategy and not just go out and build more roads.

In summary, I very much commend Mr Rattenbury for his motion. We need to get these strategies out and we need to start moving in the right direction rather than it being business as usual or some sort of random, uncoordinated direction—whatever someone felt was a good idea at the time. I commend Mr Rattenbury very much for this motion.

Question put:

That Mr Corbell’s amendments be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the negative.

MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.56), by leave: I move the amendment circulated in my name:

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