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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 4007 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

There is an amazing piece of logic that the Greens and the Government use. It goes like this. If the Labor Party reduced the subsidy to ACTION from $60m to $50m, then it is okay for the Government to reduce it from $50m to $40m. There is no logic to that. Just because you reduce it by $10m in one three-year period does not justify a second one. On the basis of the Greens' logic, we can keep taking $10m out, and whoever takes out the last $10m is no more culpable than the person who took out the first $10m.

Let us go to the facts, Mr Speaker. The Labor Party paid for those savings with efficiencies. The Labor Party paid for those savings by going to the unions and negotiating new workplace arrangements which delivered savings to the public transport system, such as getting mechanics driving buses, rearranging shifts, and allowing part-time drivers into the system so that you were not paying people who were not driving buses. These are the reforms that Labor negotiated. We were not doing what this Government has done, namely, simply taking out wholesale huge numbers of services and hiking the fares by 50 per cent.

What does the record show, Mr Speaker? The record shows that under Labor the number of passenger boardings remained stable at around 24,000. Under the Liberals they have dropped to 18,000. Labor achieved sensible, intelligent efficiencies by working in conjunction with their labour force, maintained passenger boardings and increased the number of kilometres that buses travelled. The Liberals, driven only by the desire to cut $12.7m out of ACTION, have driven down the number of people using public transport. That is the difference between Labor's record and the Liberals' record, but the Greens cannot tell the difference between maintaining and improving services as Labor did and cutting services to the extent that a quarter of the patrons walk away. I think that attitude on the part of Ms Horodny defies belief.

What also defies belief, Mr Speaker, is that Ms Horodny has the gall to come in here and say this when the Greens voted this year to cut the ACTION budget by $2m. They had the chance in this place to severely embarrass the Government by voting with Labor against the further $2m cut to ACTION. Rather than embarrass the Government, rather than put the Government on the spot about its record on public transport, they turned around and voted for another $2m cut to public transport. I do not believe that the Greens can really expect to be taken seriously when they will not distinguish between the appalling record of the Liberals and the quite serious record of the Labor Party in advocating improvements in public transport and in paying for efficiencies we made through negotiations with our work force. Let it be quite clear that there was no agenda by the Labor Party to come into this Assembly, if we had been in government, and cut another $12m out of ACTION. It would not have happened, Mr Speaker; so let us be quite clear about that. It was never part of Labor's agenda, but it was part of the Liberals' agenda.

Mr Speaker, I believe that the Greens' other amendment does deserve support. I believe that there is a need for an integrated transport strategy which takes account not just of public transport but also of other transport infrastructure like bike paths, roads and other planning issues that Mr Moore raised as well, such as the location of centres of employment and ensuring that we do not concentrate all the employment in the CBD,

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