Page 3031 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 October 2022
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habits and implement a better ticketing system. This government is all announcement and no detail and no delivery. The government even called it, at some stage, a ‘next gen’ system, and we wondered why. It is probably because it will not arrive until the next generation of Canberrans are old enough to use it!
In New South Wales, public transport travellers can use their Opal card or their own personal credit card to catch a bus. Why has this government taken so long to implement something that New South Wales delivered a long time ago and that we have been working on for such a long period of time?
What is in the budget for an updated ticketing system? Money being moved in the forward years. When I explicitly asked when the updated system will be delivered, there was no information on which month and the year it would arrive, not even a quarter it might arrive—and the lack of delivery continues.
The government has failed to deliver anything other than an interim bus timetable. The interim bus timetable has been operating for years. It has actually been going for years. I thought the government were just going to change the name of the timetable, because it has become such a permanent fixture. I do recognise that the government is going to try and bring in what the minister refers to as a full timetable next year. But, of course, the minister already conceded in question time that it is not a full timetable at all, and we do not have definitive detail on when it will begin.
Indeed, based on the minister’s answers to questions in question time yesterday, it would appear that the government is not even sure that it will be able to hire the number of drivers needed to deliver the fake full timetable. The minister said that he was optimistic about his ability to hire those staff—I am assuming as optimistic as he was about having a new ticketing system up and running by 2022! Perhaps he was optimistic about having light rail arrive at Commonwealth Park by 2024 and optimistic about light rail arriving in Tuggeranong in this half of the century!
By your department’s own admission, you are thinking about when to bring people back to public transport. How about now, now that you have taken more than 650 Civic car parks away and—to quote you directly, as we said earlier—you want to force people to change their commuting habits? Traffic disruption is occurring now, but we are waiting months and months to update the timetable.
This timetable business is just another example of the government grabbing a headline that actually lacks a substantial improvement for Canberrans and the lack of delivery continues. In the government’s own survey, one in five people were unsatisfied with the transport service and, when I asked why, the minister was not able to explain. The government was not able to explain, so much so that the government response to the estimate’s recommendation to ask customers why they are dissatisfied, has been agreed to, which is good. So I am glad that the government took on board the recommendations from the committee but how has it gotten to this, how is this not the core business of government?
Are they asleep at the wheel? We all receive regular surveys from vendors asking us for our feedback and our experience. I receive more engagement from KFC asking me how my experience was. It is embarrassing that the government cannot even engage
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