Page 2584 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 7 August 2013
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The final thing I want to turn to in my comments today is light rail. Mr Smyth’s motion calls on the government to publicly release all of the documentation it has relied upon in making its decision on light rail, and that is fine. We already passed a motion in the Assembly earlier this year promising transparency on light rail and I have always been happy for the public and the Liberals to read any of this documentation and make their assessments.
One of the ironies, of course, is that it seems quite obvious that the Liberal Party do not actually bother to read any of the information that is already publicly available. That is why they keep baying for answers that can already be found if they look on the internet or simply go to the library. For the edification of the Liberal Party, I am happy to list some of the documents the Greens and I have relied on in making the decision to progress light rail, which is exactly the point raised in Mr Smyth’s motion.
I do not think it is feasible to actually list every document. There are large amounts. The Greens have looked at this issue for years and we have considered and researched a decision properly, as decision makers should. Let me list some of the documents that we have relied on. In 1994, we had the Canberra light rail implementation study, which found that light rail is feasible for Canberra. Then there is Canberra at the Crossroads in 1997, a very good report by the conservation council and Paul Mees. That is available upstairs in the library.
In 2004, we had the Canberra public transport futures feasibility study. It found it was economically feasible and beneficial to develop rapid public transport down the Northbourne corridor. The 2005 SMEC Northbourne Avenue study and report recommended light rail on the median strip corridor, which is the current plan, and identified millions of dollars of benefits to building rapid transit on the northern corridor. There was the 2008 PricewaterhouseCooper light rail study which listed the millions of dollars in benefits of light rail in Canberra. Incidentally that conducted an initial cost-benefit analysis on a whole Canberra-wide light rail network, which was 1.62.
Of course, more recently we have had the 2011-12 URS Australia’s city to Gungahlin transit corridor study. MLAs who have read that study will have noted it concludes that light rail generates the best overall outcomes for Canberra. This was refined in 2012, with more detailed costings. There are now four project updates on progressing the Northbourne project.
This is not even all of the studies. There was a feasibility study of Flemington Road for rapid transit a few years ago. That resulted in the building of the current bus priority lanes there. There are almost endless reports and case studies from around the world about transport and light rail, and we spent a lot of time looking at them so that we could learn from them and compare them to Canberra.
I cannot even begin to count the amount of experts my staff and I have met with to talk about transport planning and transport modes—this is over many years—including of course Greens MLAs from previous Assemblies. Just as a few examples, we have met professors Graham Currie, Paul Mees and John Stone, academics from
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