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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (18 February) . . Page.. 24 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

ACTION comply with certain standards of service which were put in place by a Labor government. ACTION, to this day, complies with all of those standards that were set by the Labor Party. They should be given credit for doing so because, at the same time as they have maintained compliance with those standards, they have reduced enormously the cost of running ACTION.

Mr Berry: Have you been on a bus yet?

MR KAINE: Another member of this place challenged me the other day and said that I had not had a child who used an ACTION bus for years.

Mr Berry: No; I asked whether you have been on a bus.

MR KAINE: The facts are that I have a daughter who uses ACTION buses every day, so do not get smart with me, Mr Berry. The fact is that ACTION meets the standards the Labor Party set for it, and continues to meet them month after month, year after year. At the same time, they are getting down their costs of operating. I do not think that ought to be regarded as reprehensible.

I am aware of the fact that, as a result of the most recent changes to ACTION's timetabling and scheduling, there have been a number of individual complaints from people who say that they no longer have the service they had before. It may be that, in further implementing efficiencies, ACTION have gone finally a little further than we can expect them to go and, in doing that, have disadvantaged some individual members of the community. I said "may". I heard Mr Corbell this morning mention the case of a couple of elderly ladies in Stirling who, he said, had a half-hour walk to the bus stop. If that is the case - I have seen the letters, and I am not sure yet that it is - then this is one case where ACTION has not met its service standards. There are 300,000 people in Canberra, and this is one case where a change of bus timetable and bus schedule has disadvantaged one or two people.

There was another case where a student who happens to live at Fairbairn, the air force base, could not get to school at Campbell because there was not a bus. The implication is that we should run a bus twice a day to Fairbairn for one student. Even Mr Whitecross, with his economics background, would not put that forward as a reasonable proposition. The fact is that, when some individual is disadvantaged like that, ACTION always find an alternative solution to the problem, and they are working on each one of these that have come up lately. I do not accept the proposition that somehow or other ACTION has suddenly fallen apart at the seams; but I have taken seriously the fact that there have been, in the last few weeks, a number of individual complaints.

Having regard for the fact that the Leader of the Opposition thinks we are running an appalling and lousy bus service, I am commissioning an independent expert inquiry to review the processes used by ACTION to determine what their schedules will be. I think that should take no more than three, four, five weeks. I will table the terms of reference of the inquiry I am commissioning, so that the Leader of the Opposition can satisfy himself that we are taking a reasonable step to deal with his complaints, and within a few weeks we will table the results of that inquiry. If the inquiry demonstrates

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