Page 585 - Week 02 - Thursday, 9 March 2006
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and it would be wise to allow room in the legislation for these eventualities during an establishment phase.
However, I understand that the minister for ACTION buses would rather not allow any amendments that have a potential to undermine ACTION. I sympathise with that. Unfortunately the Minister for Urban Services, who is the minister who introduced this bill, has not supported this amendment as he does not see it as a step forward for public transport options in Canberra.
Although the Greens are fully supportive of the ACTION bus network, it must be accepted that, for Canberra’s public transport to be overhauled, there will need to be gross changes in the future and they may not always be in favour of ACTION. For any large changes to be made, the government will need to work with the Transport Workers Union to ensure that there is always plenty of warning of changes and sufficient support is put into place for retraining when necessary. In the case of the introduction of light rail, which we anticipate and fully support, this will certainly be the case.
So it has been disappointing to discover while working on this bill that again the minister for transport and Minister for Urban Services seems not to have been able to make the best decisions for Canberra’s public transport options.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (5.05): The opposition will be supporting Dr Foskey’s amendment, as I foreshadowed in my earlier speech. The reason we will be doing that is this: the flexibility in the bill which allows the minister more opportunities to look at each of the applications that might come forward would allow overall a more responsive service, a more imaginative supplementary service that can supplement and, indeed, in many cases even support the existing ACTION bus services.
If the minister is allowed to make decisions against applications without being constrained by the act, because the act determines that there might be a threat to an ACTION bus service—if he or she has got that flexibility—then this allows the minister to deal with each application on a case-by-case basis. It might even be advantageous for the minister and indeed for the community—and the minister might determine that an individual case will be advantageous to the community—for him to allow that application to proceed, even if he thought it was going to clash with an ACTION bus service. That flexibility would be there to do that.
At present, the minister will not be able to do that. The minister will be restrained by the act. He will not be able to make flexible determinations. Even if the minister does not want the flexibility to say, “Damn it, I will allow this application. I do not particularly care if it is going to really undermine this particular ACTION bus service,” if he thought at least, “This service will have merit and it only presents a minor threat to an existing ACTION bus service,” he cannot now made a determination on that basis. It is a bit of a shame that he will not have that flexibility to even address minor threat issues, which would add that little bit more of an option and put another layer of transport service on top of the existing system. After all, I am sure that the minister is all about making determinations which are in the better interest, the greater interest, of the community, not just a particular transport provider. The opposition will be very strongly supporting Dr Foskey’s amendment. We commend it, minister.
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