Page 4460 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 November 2005
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about his grandstanding on the national stage in Adelaide at some event sponsored by Amnesty International. It involved Mr Hicks and Mr Hicks senior and, of course, the Chief Minister used it as a way of bashing the Prime Minister and pushing for an Australian bill of rights, amongst other things. I think that he should spend a lot more time looking after the ACT, especially given the disastrous state of our economy.
I do not think the Human Rights Act has covered itself in glory in its first 12 months of operation in the ACT. A sensible piece of government legislation which was passed today about place and person association orders has been queried by a couple of lawyers as something that might breach the government’s own act. That sensible piece of legislation gives due regard to the rights of victims and society, and probably will be of immense benefit to the criminal himself or herself in terms of not having them associate with certain people and not having them go to certain places, yet it seems to offend our Human Rights Act.
What is the point of having an act that panders to criminals and lacks complete commonsense, one of the problems which Bob Carr, Peter Beattie and people like that gave as one of the reasons why they do not entertain having one, yet our Chief Minister continues to push it. I would like to see his travel report and see why this particular excursion was of benefit to the people of the ACT. I fail to see how. Perhaps he is thinking of a career in national politics: watch out Bob McMullan and Annette Ellis!
Mr Quinlan: We are, you are, we are all Australians.
MR STEFANIAK: Let us come back home, Ted, and talk about buses. There is a very good bus service that this government has introduced; there is a series of them. I take the 313 bus occasionally, and there is a 312 and a 314. The 313 bus starts all the way down in Lanyon, comes up through Tuggeranong, goes through Civic to the Belconnen interchange, and then goes through Page and Scullin, up Florey Drive, which is where I get off, and proceeds on through Charnwood to Fraser; a wonderful service.
I was very concerned a few nights back when I sought to take the bus at 9.28 pm, only to find that it had stopped. It does go from Civic after 6.28 pm; they are all 300 services. I got on another bus thinking that it was good that we had a new flexiservice. The bus driver did not know what number to ring for the flexiservice. When I got to the Belconnen interchange, which was pretty well deserted at that stage, the bus driver said that the next bus probably would be in about half an hour, and he was spot on there, but there were no signs or anything else there to indicate whom to ring about this flexiservice.
I commend to the government—I have mentioned it briefly to Ms Porter—that it take that on board. If you want people to patronise your bus services, do not get rid of good ones. If you want people to use something like a flexibus, for goodness sake advertise it properly and make people aware of how they can get in contact with it, as most of us carry mobiles. That really was not a good call, guys. I think you can do a lot better. Let’s put it down to teething problems. But how can we have any confidence in bus patronage increasing if perfectly good services are being cut and nothing readily available is being put in their place A bit of tweaking is required there.
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