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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (5 November) . . Page.. 3643 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

That is why we have adopted the recommendations of that inquiry. It is why the new executive director of ACTION has, as his first priority, the upgrading of ACTION buses to make them more user friendly so that people will use them. That is exactly the purpose.

I know that the sustainable transport group of the Conservation Council has the same interest in ACTION buses as the Government has. They have been to see me - - -

Members interjected.

MR KAINE: It might surprise you over there; but they have actually been to see me twice in the last few weeks, and I have set up, for their information, if they are interested, regular meetings with them. They are coming to see me every six weeks or so, because we are interested in hearing what they have to say. I have not seen the document that was handed out today - I do not have a copy of it - but I indicated that we do see the sustainable transport group of the Conservation Council as being an important community group that is making a significant input to ACTION management in order to ensure that in a few months' time ACTION will, in fact, be satisfying the needs of this community - not some other need, perceived or otherwise.

Ms Horodny asked me what our target is. I do not know that we have any target in terms of saying that we want to increase daily patronage to X thousand people. I do not think there is much merit in setting targets like that, because they are pretty artificial. But what we do want to do is to get enough people using ACTION buses, first of all, so that it is an efficient system that pays for itself at least, instead of requiring considerable inputs of public money so that it can keep running. The objective is to have a bus service which meets the needs of the community and which pays for itself.

That was the objective of the Labor Party, I note, over a period of years, because they successively reduced the amount of money that they were putting into ACTION year after year when Mr Connolly was the Minister. I might even be so unkind as to suggest that some of the troubles we were experiencing towards the end of last year may well have been the result of the reduction of public money that went into ACTION under the Labor Government. We finally saw the result of all of that. So, I think members opposite need to be a bit careful about saying "too little, too late" and criticising the current management for the ills of ACTION that have accumulated over a period of years, many of those years being those when the Labor Party was in government.

We certainly have an objective, Ms Horodny, of creating an efficient, effective bus system that is attractive to people. We want as many people as possible to get into those buses instead of into their cars, for the reasons that I outlined in answer to the earlier question. If we can get people out of their cars and into the buses, first of all, it reduces the public expense in terms of continuing to build more and more road infrastructure and maintaining it; it reduces the impact of all of those motor vehicles on the environment, on the ecology; and, at the end of the day, it is more costly, not only for individuals, but for the community, to drive their cars every day.

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