Page 5181 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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What it comes down to is that this government once again have to measure everything by inputs. It is how much they spend, not by what they get in return. I think if you are going to spend $80 million of taxpayers’ money you have to spend it wisely. I was reading through a report about the public transport system in Canberra in the 1980s, and this is one of the quotes which I found:
… while ACTION’s bus fleet and staffing levels have grown significantly, its bus scheduling, driver shift allocation and day-to-day operational management have not progressed commensurately.
That was in the 1980s. Let us look at this quote from September 2010, a year ago:
ACTION management have not been able to get the structural arrangements and responsibilities right … at some point there must be a complete overhaul of the routes rather than just ad hoc changes … The main sticking point was the Government’s insistence there be no limit to part-time drivers.
Isn’t that interesting? You have more than 20 years between drinks, 20 years between those quotes, and not much has changed. Of those 20 years, 10 of them have involved Simon Corbell in cabinet. I see a bit of a correlation here. I see a correlation between the underperformance of ACTION and the underperformance of a minister. And I do not think I would be extrapolating too much to say that public transport in Canberra is not served well when you have Mr Corbell at the helm, showing complete disregard for the $80 million or so of taxpayers’ money which he is currently presiding over at ACTION buses.
I think Canberra deserves a better bus network, I think Canberrans deserve better use of their public money and I think it is only going to come about when there is a Liberal government which actually takes pride in the network, actually understands that it is a seven-day network, understands that there is going to be reliance on the motor car, but there also has to be a frequent service connecting to the town centres so that those intertown networks can actually work properly. I urge all members to take a keen interest in the future of public transport in the ACT and to ensure that we spend wisely any subsidy that the Assembly presides over and to ensure that we do genuinely give people an opportunity to want to get on public transport in Canberra rather than those that are forced to.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (3.22): It is disappointing that we hear the same old tired rhetoric from the Liberal Party about subsidy when it comes to public transport. Spending money on public transport is not a subsidy; it is an investment. It is an investment in improving the transport choices available to Canberrans. It is an investment in building a more sustainable city. It is an investment in helping those who have limited transport choices. We should, as a city, focus on what it means to invest efficiently in public transport infrastructure.
I look forward to Mr Coe outlining where the Liberals propose they will cut money in the public transport budget. That would appear to be the logical extension of Mr Coe’s
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