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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 1 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 179 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
Gungahlin or the people of Canberra as a whole and which cannot deal with the problem at all. It will not do it even in the current situation. As I have explained, it is only moving bottlenecks.
Members have said that they think people in Gungahlin prefer to use cars. Of course people are using cars. It is more expensive to catch a bus than to use a car. It is easier to use a car, because it is so difficult to do anything else. That is why people are using cars. As Mrs Cross said, the fact that 80 per cent of people use cars is not an argument for more roads. When the zonal bus system was introduced, many people were saying, "We have to buy a second car, thanks to the Liberal government's new approach to the bus zones." I know that there are people who did not want to make that choice.
Members are saying that people like to use cars. If so many people use cars, it must be because they want to. I stress again that the choice of using a car is highly dependent on whether you can do without one. There was a very interesting article in the Australian Financial Review this year about what it means for a low-income family to have a car. It said:
Getting rid of one car a household could cut 13 years from your mortgage repayments, allow you to retire 10 years earlier or give you an extra $750,000 in superannuation.
As increasingly crowded inner-city streets around Australia continue to fuel the urban planning debate over car-parking allowances, Herron Todd White urban economist Mr Blair Warman says the car is also helping create and maintain a new class of suburban poor.
... one of [the] biggest household budget expenses was now car-related costs, which in some cases took up to 25 per cent of the household income ...
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics household expenditure survey for 1998-99, Australians spend about 16 per cent of their total budget running motor vehicles. This is the same amount of money used pay for either housing or food.
"Unfortunately, it is the lower-income households which generally have the greatest dependency upon private car transport due to their need to reside in less expensive outer suburban areas ...
Based on the weekly cost of owning and operating a medium-sized car, as estimated by the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, Mr Warman said if an average household got rid of one car it could accumulate an extra $750,000 in superannuation over a working life; retire at 55 years instead of 65 years and accumulate an extra $370,000 in super; afford to borrow an extra $80,000 on the household mortgage; and pay off an average Melbourne home over 12 years instead of 25 years.
It is a serious cost burden on people on low incomes. If that is a new thing for members, I am interested to know that it is. We know that people on medium and low incomes are struggling to manage to live in this society. The working poor are increasing at a rate that is of great concern to anyone interested in poverty and equity in our society.
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