Page 858 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 6 April 2022
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This brings me to the specifics of Mr Parton’s motion. It calls for the ACT government to restore the full timetable, but it does not acknowledge why we are running an interim timetable from COVID. We absolutely need to get back to normal services as soon as possible. In fact, we need better services, but we cannot fix the problems by passing a motion. Mr Parton has done his research. He and his adviser were really generous with their time, and I thank them for that. They showed us their data, including from questions on notice. We ran through the data ourselves and did some research. We have taken the same figures, but we have taken the opposite interpretation from those figures.
What I read is that the bus workforce is still running short due to COVID. The data on absences changes from week to week, but we have looked at it from August 2021 to February 2022. Our bus drivers are still taking as much leave now as they did at the peak of COVID. In some weeks, they are taking more leave. Transport Canberra simply does not have enough drivers, right now, to return to normal services.
Mr Parton is right to point out that COVID leave has dropped a little bit; but other types of leave have risen. The overall leave is the same or higher as it was at our peak COVID absences. Our workforce is running short. I can only speculate why annual and personal leave are up. I wonder if some drivers may have run out of COVID leave and are now using other types of leave because they are sick, or family members are sick, or because of the mental and physical health impacts of COVID or because of the mental and physical health impacts of other crises.
Some of them might be getting sick after years of running really hard through all of this difficult period of time we have been in. Some might be finally taking the annual leave that they absolutely critically need for their mental and physical health, which they have not been able to take for months or maybe years. Our drivers are frontline workers. They have just worked non-stop through multiple crises and a pandemic to get our essential workers to where they need to go. They are really tired. They have done a great job of keeping us all safe while still delivering services. We are incredibly grateful to them and we need to look after them.
I know Transport Canberra are recruiting. and they need to. They also need to recruit a more diverse workforce. We do not have many women bus drivers here in Canberra. Only around 11 per cent of our driver workforce are women. We heard some really good content from Minister Steel yesterday on this and about the efforts underway to improve this, but we need more women drivers, and more diverse drivers, and just more drivers overall.
We need a bigger, more resilient workforce before we can return to that full timetable. We absolutely want to return to normal services as soon as possible. We need to return to better services. But passing a motion is just not going to do it. I am actually really worried that we might break our people. I am worried that our drivers might get sick or might quit if we try and make them do things they cannot do.
We have seen that story play out around the country with our overworked medical staff and I am worried about reproducing that here. Even worse, I am worried that we
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