Page 927 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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the changes, and the fact that, at this stage of the game, we are talking about 2,000 people each day, I think the city deserves more bang for its buck.
This is Canberra. We should be aiming high, and I know that the minister aims high. There was a time when Canberra, as a city, was winning this battle. Mr Steel would be well aware of these historic facts, but in the 70s and 80s we were leading the nation on so many measures when it came to public transport; we were killing it. It was all being achieved at that stage by commuters in Belconnen, Woden and Tuggeranong taking feeder buses from their local neighbourhoods to town centres, then transferring to intertown express services. In 1985 our per capita usage rate was the second highest in the nation, only behind Melbourne. We had raised per capita patronage to 96 trips per annum, which is a figure that we would die for now.
That is ancient history now, but it remains, Madam Speaker, as proof that if you get the network right, it is more than possible to convince Canberrans to leave their car at home or even sell one of them. The 1970s and 80s showed us that a low-density city could become less car dependent in a relatively short period of time.
The Canberra Liberals are committed to light rail, but we are also committed to Canberrans getting value for money, and I am not sure that we are getting that at the moment. It is difficult to argue with most of the stated 2020-21 strategic objectives. “Improving customer experience with public transport and driving an increase in patronage”: at the end of the day, with most of this, we are on the same page, in terms of the end result. Some of the targets seem a little low. I would give as an example operating efficiency, where the directorate has a target of reducing operating costs per network kilometre by one per cent each year from the 2019-20 targets.
The budget statement concedes that the establishment of cashless travel will be a big driver in operating efficiency. Of course, we are still dragging our feet on that front, and I am still at a loss to understand the extraordinary delays in this whole process—the establishment of a new ticketing system for Canberra’s network. This has been promised to the Canberra public for a long time, and history would show that it is perhaps unlikely to be delivered by its most recent promised deadline of 2023. I sincerely hope that I am proven wrong on that front. I am severely frustrated, as is the bulk of the Canberra public, at the minister’s insistence on hiding behind the confidentiality deed and dodging his responsibility in dealing at all with this issue publicly.
Strategic objective No 3 in the budget papers is “to drive innovation and a sense of excitement about public transport”. All I would say, Madam Speaker, is that if you are looking for a minister to create a sense of excitement about anything, Mr Steel would be my go-to man. We will be monitoring the level of excitement created by Mr Steel, and I am sure that it will exceed expectations.
Of course, it is not possible to speak about Transport Canberra without making mention of the ongoing headaches around weekend timetables. They are still a fair distance from where we need to be, and that is despite an extraordinary effort to recruit more staff. There is an elephant in the room here that the government really
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