Page 3775 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 28 October 2015
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government now saying that it is no longer going to have any exclusive supply arrangements? For years there have been bus companies that have been desperate to enter the ACT. In actual fact we have got a bus company in Queanbeyan that drives on Canberra roads every day and cannot pick up and set down in the ACT. Where is Mr Barr’s reform for that?
Just yesterday he received a paper which said, “If you privatise ACTION buses you will reap $47 million per year.” Incidentally, if you gave $200,000 to each of the perpetual plate owners it would be approximately $25 million. Yesterday they got a paper which said they could save $47 million every single year if they privatise ACTION. What are they going to do?
I respect the decision that Mr Barr made to keep ACTION in government hands. That is an entirely inconsistent argument with what he said earlier today, “We’re for the passenger. We’re for patrons. We’re for consumers.” That is inconsistent with what you said yesterday. So it is up to you—
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Dr Bourke): Mr Coe, sit down please. Please address your remarks to the chair.
MR COE: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Mr Barr is going to use this 24-month stay of execution as a hope that this issue will just fade away, a hope that these family businesses will just fade away and will no longer be a political issue. You can rest assured it will remain a pretty big issue for those couple of hundred families. It will remain a pretty big issue when they get $150,000 wiped off their value on Friday as a result of this decision.
I will say it for about the fifth time: the opposition sees ride sharing as a part of Canberra’s transport future but that does not mean you cannot recognise the historic contributions that taxis have made and the very important investments that they have made, too. As recently as last year eight plates changed hands for an average of $245,000, and under the price to earnings ratio I mentioned earlier they may well be worth $60,000 each as of Friday. Last year someone could have bought, in effect, a $240,000 asset and on Friday it is potentially slashed by 75 per cent. That is a very real issue, at a time when this government is spending $783 million on the light rail contract in addition to the $50 million that they have already spent in-house on light rail, in addition to about another $80 million we expect them to spend in-house on light rail before 2020, all to have a suboptimal public transport system from Gungahlin to the city, for a tram that is going to be slower than the current buses, for a tram that is going to force transfers and result in worse public transport options for people in Gungahlin suburbs.
I call on the government to support the motion and to recognise the investments that people have made here in Canberra. I call on them to go back to their task force, to go back to the directorate and seek advice about how a scheme can be tabled which recognises the investments that people have made. Some of those plates were given free of charge. Some of them did have some concessions attached to them. But many were bought at auction and relatively recently, as recently as 1995.
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