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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (18 June) . . Page.. 1723 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

This Government realised that there were problems with ACTION, and we commissioned a comprehensive inquiry into what the fundamental problems were. We have had that report. The Labor Party could have done that at any time during the five years it was in office; it did not. It did not care. It was busily featherbedding the interests of the TWU members who support it, and to hell with the travelling public. Now they have the effrontery to come into this place and say that this is all the fault of the Liberal Party. Mr Speaker, it is not. I totally refute the allegations made by Mr Whitecross. I know he has to get out there and make a running. I know he has discovered that nobody knows who he is, so he has to get out there and try to say a few controversial things and get his name up in the media. But he will not achieve it in this way. The public in the ACT are too enlightened to be conned by this kind of duplicitous debate that Mr Whitecross is entering into.

One would think, from the reaction of the Labor Party and the Transport Workers Union, that we were destroying ACTION, that there was a massive attack on ACTION. All that has happened is that we have allowed to pick up passengers an operator from interstate who has been operating a service into Canberra that has been in existence since 1926 with the constraint that its buses had to drive past passengers standing on the roadside and not pick them up. If it was raining or snowing or sleeting, they had to drive past and leave them there, in the hope that one day along would come an ACTION bus to pick them up. In the days of the Labor Party, there were many occasions when they did not turn up. What we are saying is that, if a Deane's bus is passing an ACTION bus stop and there are passengers standing there waiting to go somewhere and no ACTION bus is in sight, they can get on. Is this going to destroy ACTION?

Have they bothered to inquire just how many passengers are involved in this massive transportation exercise? Of course they have not, and they do not care. They pick this issue up and try to turn a molehill into a mountain. Mr Speaker, you cannot build molehills into mountains. You certainly cannot do it in this way. Either they are totally unaware, or they do not care, that there is a reciprocity in this; that, in exchange for Deane's being able to pick up passengers and drop them off within the boundaries of the Australian Capital Territory, we may have the reciprocal right of taking ACTION buses into Queanbeyan. This then is an opportunity for ACTION to prove that it is, and can be, a competitive operation, that it does not need the protection of a monopoly, if and when the opportunity arises. Why is the TWU so sensitive about this issue? Do they suspect that they cannot run a bus system that can be competitive? Is that the problem? If that is the problem, I think the travelling public is not going to have much sympathy for them.

Mr Speaker, this is a nonsense issue. I am amazed that the TWU and the Labor Party are attempting to turn it into something larger than life. It is a very minor issue. It has very little to do with the current operations of ACTION. It opens up a new possibility for ACTION that has not existed before, that is, on a reciprocal basis to tap into the potential customers in Queanbeyan. Where, then, is the problem? Mr Whitecross carried on with a great deal of rhetoric, but he did not indicate quite what it was that was the problem. The answer is that there is none. Mr Whitecross, yet again, has picked a dud issue on which to try to create an image and a reputation. It will not wash. I do not support it.

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