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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 3994 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

When Mr Thurston took control, the first priority was to make sure that the buses that we run now run on time and that they do run. The meeting of bus timetables has been achieved, I guess, close to 100 per cent of the time right now. That is a major improvement. I suggest that that is why the number of complaints has fallen off. We have put in better timetabling information. We have Austouch terminals in the interchanges. That night services trial that Mr Whitecross made so much of is actually starting next month. The Government will make sure that we have an improved summer network service; that is, we are not going to operate on the reduced services over the holiday period that we have operated on in previous years. We will be introducing those more frequent services on selected routes throughout the day that Mr Whitecross also talked about.

But you do not reschedule buses on the spur of the moment. The rescheduling is in hand, and we will have those more frequent services, where they are required, in the very near future. We are introducing midi-buses so that we do not have those huge buses running around with three passengers in them. If there is going to be a bus with three passengers in it, it will be a midi-bus, which operates at three-quarters of the operating cost of the bigger bus. We have already introduced fully accessible buses on two routes so that people who have disabilities and who have difficulty getting on and off buses can now do so much more easily. More of those will be introduced over the next few weeks. The particular needs of those newer customers out in Gungahlin, who came to see me and complained that they did not have a direct bus service to Canberra, are being met. They will soon have a service to Civic.

Mr Corbell: He does not like to mention who went with them.

MR KAINE: Here comes Little Sir Echo up at the back. He knows what the need was, because he was in my office when it was articulated by people from the Gungahlin Community Council, and he knows that we are moving to rectify it.

On the question of loss of patronage, certainly ACTION lost patronage. That is one of the reasons why I was concerned about it. But it is nothing like the 25 per cent that Mr Whitecross claims. He needs to do his homework. In fact, it is quite mischievous for him to be making that claim. If he read the annual report of the Department of Urban Services, he would get the facts. It is not a fact that patronage fell by 25 per cent. Recent weekly patronage returns suggest that the decline in patronage has been arrested. In fact, it has stabilised. Service improvements that we will be making over the next few weeks, we expect confidently, will see an increase in patronage growth. They are some of the things that the Graham report recommended.

Mr Whitecross talked about a fare increase. Prior to the increase in fares in July 1995, the average fare charged by ACTION was about 50 per cent of the average fare charged in other States for similar services. In other words, the passengers were not making a fair contribution. We made a commitment to bring these fares into line with New South Wales over a two-year period. But in 1997-98, because of other pressures, we decided that there would be no fare increases in this current year.

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