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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3650 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Labor member for Monaro, who got himself elected on being "your local voice in Bob Carr's Labor government"has been silent. He was hit by a broadside and did not understand what was happening. The voice of the people of Queanbeyan in Bob Carr's Labor government was left outside when this decision was made.

Government members opposite, with all their good relationships with their mates in Macquarie Street, have not done anything for the people of the ACT. The minister for transport in the ACT had the audacity to get up in this place and say, "I'm not responsible for trains."Today, well over a month after I wrote to him, he wrote back to say, "I'm not the minister for trains and I have passed it on to the Chief Minister."

What has the Chief Minister done? After people on this side of the house raised the issue continually over a week or so, he finally got his act together sufficiently to write to Bob Carr. It was not a very good letter to Bob Carr. It was one that said, "I'm going through the motions, Bob, but if you can't do anything for us I'll understand."

That is not good enough. The motion today calls for this government to really and truly represent the needs of the people of the ACT, the needs of the battlers, the needs of the pensioners, the needs of the people with disabilities, with bad hearts, with bad knees, with dickie hips, and take those needs of the people of the ACT to Bob Carr and Michael Costa and get a better outcome for the people of the ACT.

This is a most important issue for the people of the ACT, for their quality of life, for the economy of the ACT, for the tourism of the ACT, and if we are ever going to have a good rail link, a moderately fast train or a very fast train, we need to maintain the train service that we currently have. It is incumbent upon all of us in this Assembly to send a very strong message to the people who run the train that we expect it to continue.

I commend the motion to the house.

MS TUCKER (5.35): I will be supporting this motion and the government's and Ms Dundas's amendments. Rail services are vital to any sustainable transport infrastructure for this country, and it is crucial that we start to wind back some of the shift towards air and road travel that we have seen over the past 40 years.

In terms of energy efficiency in travel and general physical comfort, no other form of mass transit comes close to rail. In a developed society like ours, public transport becomes attractive when it is both fast and frequent. But given the enormous subsidy we give to road infrastructure and given the way the high-energy extravagance of air travel is not accounted for, the present economics of transport militate against Sydney to Canberra rail. In other words, leaving the question of a very fast train aside, a frequent Canberra to Sydney service will not be economically viable in the short term until there is some real expenditure to upgrade the line and so significantly shorten travel time. That is unlikely to happen without a major public investment from both national and state governments.

The point is that the rail link between Canberra and Sydney could quite easily be improved. The existing trains could travel faster. New machines could easily run faster again on conventional tracks if they were upgraded. While a world based on speed is perhaps unhealthy, the viability of public transport hinges on convenience, which is both

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