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We have to look at ways of integrating public transport and transport requirements into new areas, rather than designing areas essentially for the car and looking at public transport as an add-on afterwards. Similarly, we have to look at making provision in our planning for things like park and ride, rather than, once again, setting up our town centres for the car and then belatedly walling off sections of our car parks and reusing them for park and ride and those things. Public transport should be integrated into what we do. It should also be integrated into the design of our towns and our suburbs. We have to have a vision for our suburbs not just of the glorious urban sprawl of the 1950s, where it did not matter how far away you were from anywhere else because all you had to do was jump in your car and drive, but of planning which takes account of the need for community facilities and easily accessible places of work.

An issue I have drawn attention to previously and which I briefly want to highlight again is the importance of planning and incorporating employment close to where people live. One of the big problems that face people who live in Tuggeranong, where I live, is the time and expense involved in commuting to work, and one of the reasons for that is that almost everybody in Tuggeranong who works has to commute to outside Tuggeranong, often to the city, to work. This is a big expense; it is a big producer of emissions, which are both a cause of pollution of our immediate environment and a source of greenhouse gases; and it takes away from the fabric of our community - more time spent commuting is less time spent with our families and our partners. These are things that need to be built into the planning to make it easier for us to work closer to where we live.

Mr Speaker, in looking at the social impact of public transport, it is important to understand how public transport helps to bring people out of the suburbs and into common places, to interact and to derive the benefit of being part of a community instead of being isolated. Especially given the fact that most of our suburbs are planned mainly around private transport, people of limited means who have only one vehicle, which perhaps is being used to go to work, having access to public transport so that they too can participate in the community is a very important social justice issue, and an issue we should all take seriously. The social justice needs of small groups of people wanting to access public transport should not be subsumed by the financial imperatives of cost-benefit analyses of individual bus routes and individual points on the timetable.

Another social issue where public transport was, until recently, performing an important role was the provision of late night buses to get young people home from Civic. That service was clearly set up with social objectives in mind. It was set up on the recommendation of the Community Safety Committee and was designed to bring people out of Civic, to avoid the problem of people being stuck in Civic late at night waiting for taxis, and to get affordable transport home. The people who wrote the Liberal Party's policies understood this and indicated their support for additional late night or early morning services to help provide an affordable and safer way for young people to get home at night. There was no mention there of financial imperatives. The emphasis was on the social benefits, and quite rightly. Mr De Domenico, in cancelling the service, could think only of the financial cost of providing it. Looking at public transport, it is a worrying trend if every service, regardless of its social benefits, is going to be evaluated purely on the basis of whether or not we make a profit from it.

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