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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 1030 ..

MR DE DOMENICO (continuing):

Just for Mr Whitecross's education in this place and also for his education in being a politician, let me say that Mr Whitecross will learn, once and for all, that it does not pay to knock all the time. Also, it does not pay to say the wrong thing when you are not sure of what you are saying. If Mr Whitecross were to be really truthful in this place, he would say that he was offered a full and total briefing and was advised that the set of figures that he was given was only one week out of the set that was collected over one year. I am aware that his office spent weeks upon weeks comparing one week's figures with a year's timetable. So, if Mr Whitecross had really wanted to be briefed and to know the full truth and the full aspect of the ACTION bus network, he would have accepted the Government's invitation for a full and total briefing. The fact that he has not done that proves once and for all that all he wanted to do was to play politics with the ACTION bus network.

Mr Whitecross would also know that there have been changes made to the network, I think, every year since I have been in this place. Changes were made by his predecessors Mr Connolly and Mr Lamont. What the changes do, Mr Speaker, quite quickly, is redirect those services to the areas where most people want to use them. Yes, they do affect numbers of journeys; but the way they affect them, Mr Speaker, is that you will have fewer buses with no people in them - and I will repeat it for Mr Whitecross's edification - you will have fewer buses with no people in them, which are driving around empty now, than you would have had before this new network came into being.

Had Mr Whitecross known his electorate properly, he would have spoken to the people of Calwell. He would have spoken to people around the shopping centre in Calwell, where the new roundabout went in, where there is one bus stop on either side. I have actually gone out there and doorknocked and spoken to the people of Calwell, Mr Whitecross - the ones that rejected you by voting you in fourth or fifth instead of first, second or third, where the Liberal Party members and Mr Osborne were elected in. I am sure that they would not have talked to you, because probably half of them would not know you anyway.

MR SPEAKER: Relevance.

MR DE DOMENICO: But the ones he would have talked to - Mr Speaker, they have left. There is no-one here. It is a waste of blowtorch fuel, I have to tell you, because there is no-one here. Their support for Mr Whitecross is all over the place. I will not call for a quorum; they would not come back. He is the leader only this week anyway; so, who cares?

The bottom line, Mr Speaker, is this: This Government has a responsibility to the 95 per cent of people that do not use the buses. We would like to have more of those use them, by the way. Perhaps more would use them if they realised that this Government is very fair dinkum about the fact that we will have fewer and fewer buses running with no-one in them. We will have more buses, perhaps even smaller buses and, Mr Whitecross, perhaps even taxi cabs put out to people so that they can be picked up and delivered to where they want to go at the time that they want to travel.

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