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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4089 ..

I suspect that the problem for this government is that it has not quite realised that the taxi industry is public transport and so dysfunctional is the ACT government’s approach to public transport that we actually have two ministers responsible for public transport. We have Mr Corbell, who is responsible for buses; and Mr Wood, who is responsible for taxis and hire cars. This is a totally dysfunctional approach.

Today I was actually reading, in preparation for the MPI, the OECD report about urban renaissance. One of the things it says is that you have to break down the structures between organisations to get better integration. What better example do we have than when we are talking about public transport, when we are talking about sustainability and public transport and we have two separate entities—ACTPLA and urban services—planning in relation to transport and not really getting it together.

One of the principal recommendations in this report that came down in December 2003 was about making transport more sustainable. We actually looked at issues about demand responsive transport. But has this government listened? Has this government taken on any of this? Mr Corbell has talked about demand responsive transport on and off and we had a few feasibility studies, but there were substantive suggestions in this report, to which the response from the government was: “Well, we asked the ACTION authority whether they thought it was a good idea, and they said, ‘No, we don’t want to do it,’ and so we’ve decided not to do it; we’ve decided not even to consider it.”

As a result, we have got to the end of this Assembly with no progress at all on sustainable transport planning; no progress at all on this government’s commitment to demand responsive transport. This is one of the multitude of reasons why the Liberal opposition opposes much of what is in this bill. Because we have undertaken to be brief, I will be brief. We will be supporting the notion of a government funded buyout of the taxi industry—and I will come back to that—we will be supporting a government funded buyout of the hire car industry; and we will be supporting the hire car code of practice.

But the rest of the bill that relates to the regulation of taxi plates and the auctioning of taxi plates will be opposed most categorically by this opposition. There is nobody in this community, no-one in this community outside the ranks of the government, who thinks this is a good idea.

In some ways, it is difficult to find the way forward for the taxi industry, but this certainly is not the way forward. Again it is the Yes, Minister thing; we have to do something; therefore we must do this. It is the wrong solution and we must oppose it. I am confident that the non-government members of this Assembly understand that and understand that this is a lost opportunity to deal with demand responsive public transport.

But I must go back to the principal reason why I have encouraged my colleagues not to vote against this bill in principle, and that is to put on the record the need for a hire car buyout scheme. I will say what I have said on at least two occasions in this place since the government announced that, essentially, the only substantive recommendation of the planning and environment committee that has been adopted is this one, and that is: the government needs to be congratulated for agreeing to a budget buyout of the hire car industry.

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