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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (18 June) . . Page.. 1733 ..

Mrs Carnell: Maybe there are only 10 people. Are you going to put a bus on for 10 people?

MR HUMPHRIES: As the Chief Minister suggests, supposing there are only 10 people who might want to travel on this route between A and B, why should not those 10 people have access to that service?

Mr Berry: But there is not anybody.

MR HUMPHRIES: You do not know that. Why would Deane's Buslines approach the ACT Government to pick up these people and take them from A to B if they are non-existent? Why would someone approach the ACT Government to run a service like this if there were no passengers?

I can guarantee that I will eat all the papers on my desk if nobody wants to get on this service. I can guarantee that that is what will happen. I will eat every one of these papers, and there are quite a few papers on my desk today. I will not eat the plastic. I do not think I could digest the plastic; that is a little bit too much to get through the gullet. But I can guarantee I will eat all the papers on my desk, and maybe Mrs Carnell's and Mr Kaine's as well, if nobody gets on this bus service. You can sit here and watch me. We all know that there will be people who want to get on this bus service. It is such a silly claim - we do not want to have this service operating because nobody will get on it - that we will have to see it operate on only the very first day to realise that people are going to get on this service and they are going to use it.

Mr Whitecross pointed out that there is no present ACTION bus route that follows the particular alignment of the proposed Deane's bus route from point A to point B, from Canberra to Queanbeyan. That may be true, and it has a lot to do with the fact that ACTION presently does not have any penetration into Queanbeyan - a matter we might be able to change as a result of a trial like this. Be that as it may, it does not alter the fact that, as I think Mr Kaine suggested, there is still the man who comes out of the Macquarie Hostel and wants to go to Fyshwick. If he wants to go to Fyshwick, what he might well have to do now is get an ACTION bus from Macquarie Hostel - I do not know where to exactly, but say - to Red Hill or Civic, and then another ACTION bus to the place he wants to go to in Fyshwick. He has to catch two ACTION buses. This passenger certainly will be out there waiting for the Deane's bus to come along if he knows that the Deane's bus route goes directly from the Macquarie Hostel to Fyshwick, the place he wants to go to.

They are the passengers we are talking about, Mr Whitecross. They are the people who are not following an ACTION route now because it is too long and too complicated, or they do follow it but it takes a long time to get there. They want to get to Fyshwick, and the Deane's bus will take them there. Why should they not get on that bus? Because, we have heard, it is the thin end of the wedge. It is the slippery slope. It is going to destroy ACTION. Mr Speaker, we really are being taken for a lot of suckers here. As if this first bus route is going to divert to another part of ACTION's territory and take a few more passengers, and then another diversion occurs and another bus route is taken over, and then there are a few more bus routes going on.

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