Page 3034 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 October 2022
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policy platform. We also need to expand our bus fleet. We are growing as a city. We have an extra 10,000 people each year, so we need more buses as we grow. We also need to be doing as much as we can in the ACT, and in our discussions with the federal government and parliament, to progress future stages of light rail, including getting more funding for this really important project.
As always, I will chat a little bit about active travel. I am always concerned that we are not investing enough to encourage enough people to use active travel in line with the targets we have set there. We did get some really good projects in this budget. We have the extension of the Belconnen bikeway. We have replacement of the bridges at Umbagong District Park. That is great. It is probably not enough to get the kind of mode shift we are looking for, away from private motor vehicles, and to encourage more people to walk and ride, but it is really great progress.
We are still featuring a lot of missing active travel links. I was pleased to see some policy work come out to identify that work. We need to make sure that we have the right investment so that when people are walking and riding they do not have a network that disappears halfway through, they do not have cracked and broken pavements and they do not have paths that are too narrow for good use.
I was pleased to see the $77 million proposed for active travel, but we are still a bit concerned about how we are counting active travel. It looks like a good, big, solid amount. It looks like almost $20 million a year, which is great for the pipeline. But a fifth of that is a sealed shoulder on the Monaro Highway upgrade. That is a great project; there is nothing wrong with that project. But we think that is more of a road than active travel. When we think about active travel, and dedicated funding for it, we think that dedicated funding should be for dedicated active travel. We need to be spending on more than just sealing shoulders. We need to dedicate more money to that separated active travel network.
Our investment in new transport infrastructure needs to reflect that general desire to shift away from private motor vehicles. We will always have cars in Canberra. Of course we will. But we cannot afford to have every single adult driving everywhere they need to go. We know what will happen in a city of our size if that is the only viable mode of transport that we have. We will all be stuck in traffic all of the time.
I want to chat briefly about waste and recycling. There is quite a lot in this budget on waste and recycling in the circular economy. We are getting a lot of new policy work, too, which is fantastic to see. I was pleased to note that we have committed to the commencement of the procurement for a new materials recovery facility and for our FOGO facility, our food and garden organics facility. I am particularly pleased to see that we got federal funding for that. Well done; that is great.
It is also really good that we are building those two facilities together. I hope that means we can move to a place where all of the standard packaging can go into one facility or the other, as we phase out plastics. If our standard packaging cannot go into one of those facilities, we need to be phasing out production of that packaging altogether. It needs to be recyclable. We are building two brand-new facilities. If we cannot recycle it, we actually should not be using it.
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