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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 3025 ..

MR WOOD (11.36): Just to set the record straight on a couple of things, it was Kippax Fair that went to Mr Berry and said, "Please, can you help stop this insane approach?". It was the senior citizens who went to Mr Berry, as their representative, asking the same question. They did not go to Mr Hird - or, if they did, Mr Hird did not take any notice. Let us be quite clear. Mr Berry responded, as we all should do, to requests from the community. I want to make one other little comment. I have seen Mr De Domenico's tactics before, in respect of libraries. He put out a discussion paper, and you can bet your bottom dollar that that was going to be what happened unless there was a furore in the community. Then he went to a meeting and said, "I was not going to do that anyway. This is just a discussion paper. This is just to air the issue". This is the same tactic here. He puts out documents and says, "Oh, no, we are not going to do that. It is not as bad as you say it is. We are not going to cut eight services to Kippax. That is just a dream". I have seen this tactic before. Unless you respond quite vigorously to some of these discussion papers, you can be quite sure that they will be implemented.

MS HORODNY (11.38): I welcome any motion that gives the Assembly an opportunity to discuss the issue of bus services in the ACT and particularly to highlight the lack of service, the increasing lack of service, provided by ACTION. We also received the leaked copy of ACTION's review of the Belconnen services on which this motion is based. Given the current poor state of the ACTION bus network, we find it hard to believe the paper's view that some Belconnen suburbs in the Kippax area are overserviced. I have had a lot of people ringing up and saying that they are very concerned about lack of services to Kippax in particular.

We can only conclude that the review is really about cutting costs and not about enhancing services. Indeed, the summary of this leaked document states that the No. 1 advantage of the proposed changes is cost savings to ACTION. The Government seems to assume that if only a few people are using a service it should be cut back, but the inconvenience caused by the cutbacks results in even fewer people using the service. Reduced passenger numbers then become grounds for cutting even more services.

Mr De Domenico: This is Green logic, is it?

MS HORODNY: It is basic commonsense, Mr De Domenico, that when you reduce bus services people cannot rely on those services any longer and they stop using them. This results in a downward spiral that will continue to make our public transport system worse and worse. Public transport in the ACT will always struggle to gain patronage and to be economically viable while governments put so much emphasis on improving private motor car usage and on minimising expenditure on public transport. Mrs Carnell actually said in a radio interview recently that Canberra was not designed to pay for itself; that it was made to look pretty, and we have so much public space to look after.

Mr De Domenico: She was right.

MS HORODNY: She was exactly right. I do not disagree with that. It is difficult to provide a good, healthy and economically viable public transport system in the ACT in the short term; but, Mr De Domenico, look at all the money that we are putting into the road system here. You said on TV last week, and I commended you for saying it, that we do not need another loop road in the ACT; we have too many roads as it is and they are

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