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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3409 ..

captured from the sale of land and the building of associated infrastructure along the railway route provided the wealth to develop the railways. We might have a nineteenth century model but that model still has a role to play. We should not discount that model just because it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Mr Hargreaves touched on many of the problems associated with public-private partnerships. However, he did say that there were some benefits and he dwelt on those as well. As I said earlier, I would like to deal with the provision of transport infrastructure. We have talked about tollways and the like but I would like to look also at public transport. In a sense, public transport is a bit of a misnomer. When we talk about public transport people presume that it is paid for by the public purse. But let us consider the taxi service—one essential element of public transport in this city and in every city.

The taxi service in this city and in every city around Australia is provided by the private sector. Private people running businesses provide what could be called mass transport—transporting more than one person, or transporting people in vehicles not privately owned by those who are being transported. That is the distinction that we should be trying to make. Mass transit is not necessarily public transport in the sense that it is publicly owned; mass transit is the transporting of members of the general public. We must have a clear look at and a clear discussion about that distinction. Until we do so we will be missing a lot of opportunities in the ACT.

There have been problems in Victoria, which led the way in Australia in the transition to public-private transport partnerships. Victoria got its fingers burnt. The classic example that arose in April or May last year was when one of the major companies that had been contracted to run the tram system in Victoria pulled out and left town. I will not name the company as its name escapes me at the moment, but it entered into and signed a contract when, quite simply, there was not enough probity on either side. As a result the company eventually decided that it was better and cheaper to cut its losses, pay the penalties and get out.

Unfortunately, Melbourne now has a tram system that is run almost entirely on a monopoly. There remains only one major operator of the Melbourne tram system. That failure does not mean that public-private partnerships do not work; it means that we have to be careful and smart and that we have to learn new ways of doing things. We discussed this issue on another occasion. A couple of years ago, during the Estimates Committee process, I remember asking the transport minister whether he would consider private funding for public transport. He went so far as to say that if the ACT wanted public-private partnerships for something other than buses he would consider it, but that the bus system would stay in public ownership.

I thought that we made some progress but we need to make more progress than that. Last year I had the privilege of attending the 55th world congress of the International Union of Public Transport in Madrid, which dealt at considerable length with the issue of public-private partnerships in the transport industry. We looked at a number of places where it had worked, where it had not worked, where it had started off okay and where it had come off the rails a bit. We then looked at how the European Union in particular was working towards making public-private partnerships perform better for the people of Europe.

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