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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 4000 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

We have watched over a number of years as patronage on the ACTION bus services has gone down. Mr Whitecross says in his motion that it has gone down by 25 per cent. I believe that is not correct. I believe the budget papers this year indicated that that decline is actually 18 per cent. That is still an enormous decline in patronage and it is certainly something that worries me. What we have here now in the ACT is a continuing downward spiral.

We heard regularly from the previous Minister, Mr De Domenico, that if buses were not full he would ensure that the service was pulled off the road. I am concerned that Mr Kaine still has this approach. He said today that if a bus service has only three passengers it is not worth running that service and that service should be pulled. This shows that Mr Kaine has a real problem with a proper integrated transport strategy. If you have a bus service where you have only three people on that service continually, the question I would like to ask is, "Why are not more people catching that bus service? Why can we not fill that bus, rather than get rid of that service and disadvantage the three people who are catching it?".

What we should be doing is looking at how we can improve the bus service, make it an advantage for people to catch buses over driving cars, and attract people away from cars and onto buses. The more buses we take off the road, the less attractive the service becomes. More people then who would prefer to catch buses are forced to drive. Mr Corbell talked about the lack of services to Gungahlin. I have heard continually from people in Gungahlin who would like to catch one easy bus to Civic. I have heard that they have needed to purchase a second car in their family in order to get to work. That is an appalling situation.

The lack of services to Gungahlin, in particular, has caused all sorts of unnecessary congestion and problems for traffic from that area, particularly in the mornings. I believe it is one of the main reasons for the push for a John Dedman Parkway, and that is a very serious issue. I have been saying time and time again that we need a proper service for Gungahlin. We need to take as many people as we can out of Gungahlin on buses in order to see what the real demand is for a road from that area.

Due to the huge public response to the changes and the cuts to ACTION, Mr Kaine did, to his credit, in February, of this year, I believe, commission a study into ACTION. He commissioned Roger Graham to conduct that study and Mr Graham reported in May of this year. I believe that the Roger Graham report is a frank and fearless report. I believe it tells it like it is about the ACTION bus service. Mr Graham found that there are, indeed, efficiencies to be made in the ACTION bus service, and he has said that savings from those efficiencies, if they were put back into the service, could result in a much better service at no extra cost to the Government.

Mr Speaker, I have circulated two amendments to the motion that Mr Whitecross has put up today. I seek to include two additional clauses. One of the clauses condemns the previous Labor Government for also cutting ACTION's budget, and that was by $10m over three years. Not only did the Labor Government cut the budget. As well, neither they nor the current Government have grappled with the transport problems of the ACT.

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