Page 2926 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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shifts a bonus paid day off. Lots of places have rostered days off; this could be something that is available for weekend bus drivers. It could be something simple like a thankyou lunch for drivers who are stepping up to fill the gaps while recruitment is underway. Maybe one of the depots could host a lunch for everyone who is on shift that weekend, so that as people stop by to have a comfort break and fill up their bus, they can have a feed as well. I am sure there are lots of options, and the government should test them out with their drivers and with the union, to work out what would be appropriate and what will actually make a difference to getting bus drivers to drive our buses over the weekend.
Fourthly, the government needs to give the community confidence that it is taking the problems seriously and that it will have a solution soon. It is not good enough to have this rolling on week after week, with no outward sign that there is progress. The community needs to know when things are likely to be fixed.
That is why my point (2)(c) says “release, within one month, an action plan,” and it then goes through a list of things that, hopefully, with the passage of this motion, the government will commit to do. The community will then have a time line for when the government will release—within a month, a month from now—an action plan for the things that it will do to improve our weekend network.
To have a change in our network with a 40 per cent increase in use on Sunday and an increase of a third on Saturday is great. This is a significant achievement that we should be celebrating. The way to celebrate is to make it even better, by stopping the 10 to 20 per cent of cancellations.
I look forward to the release of the government’s action plan. I also very much hope that Miss Burch will vote for my amendment. I am not sure whether that will be the case. Genuinely, Miss Burch, I am trying to put forward something which will lead to a positive improvement on weekends. I am genuinely trying to build on your motion—and I very much appreciate you moving your motion—by making it even stronger. I thank Miss Burch and Minister Steel for their considerable interest in our bus system, and I look forward to a better, more reliable bus system on weekends.
MISS C BURCH (Kurrajong) (4.15): I am incredibly disappointed in the response that we have received from the minister here today. He stood up and rattled off all of the extra services that Canberrans were promised under the new network, not the services that have actually been delivered.
The minister continues to refer to these weekend service failures as teething issues, despite the fact that, as we know, the government was warned about these issues years ago by the union. We are now months into the new bus network and we are still seeing hundreds of service failures every single weekend. It is not only service after service, but also it is sometimes up to five services in a row. People are sitting there with no idea if a bus is ever going to arrive.
When will the minister finally admit that these are no longer just teething issues and that this is a serious long-term problem that he needs to address? Instead the attitude that we have seen from the minister is, “If your bus doesn’t show up, perhaps you
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