Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1826 ..

MR WOOD: Mr Speaker, my question to Mr Kaine is also about that report on ACTION. Mr Kaine, that report found that the holiday timetable introduced by your Government over Christmas and Easter had been a contributing factor to the loss of patronage. The report recommended that these service curtailments no longer take place. I notice that the Minister has disassociated himself from the previous decisions of Mr De Domenico and his Government. Maybe he will disassociate himself completely from what has happened before. Minister, the report also identified the reintroduction of a service similar to the Nightrider service and stated:

Later night services should be provided, as in other capital cities, operating from the appropriate late-night patronage generators.

For two years the Opposition has been telling you that the implementation of the summer timetable was having an adverse effect on ACTION. Why did you not listen to us? Why did you spend the money, and how much did you spend on this report which tells you what you should already have known?

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, I cannot comment on why something was not done previously about the summer timetable. The summer timetable was pretty well over by the time I became Minister. It is very interesting that the Opposition now seems to be taking the view that all of the matters dealt with in the Graham report were already known to them before the inquiry was conducted. They are having themselves on, Mr Speaker. They were no better informed on the reasons why ACTION was suffering some difficulty than I was. If they had been, I have no doubt that they would have been giving me lots of advice. They were giving me no advice at all. All they were doing was trying to find out what I was intending to do to fix the problem.

Even Mr Whitecross, who indicated a couple of days ago that he supported the Graham report totally, is now beginning to raise questions in my mind about whether he does. I would like him to stand up now and tell me whether he really supports the recommendations of the Graham report or whether he does not. Mr Wood might care to do the same. The fact is that the Graham report has raised a number of things which he suggests the Government should be doing to make ACTION more user friendly and more efficient, to use our resources better. We have indicated that we intend to take all of those things under consideration and implement as many of the recommendations as we can as quickly as we can.

One of those things is to restructure the network, to make the ACTION network more compatible with what the users require. That includes increased late-night services - I do not know whether they will be Nightrider services, but late-night services - eliminating the different Christmas and holiday timetables, or, if we are going to modify them, at least follow the same routes and adopt a somewhat similar pattern even though the frequency might be a little less. These are things that I suppose, on reflection, might appear to be obvious solutions to the problem; but I submit that a week ago they were no more obvious to Mr Wood than they were to me. That is why we commissioned an

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .