Page 3864 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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to be proactive about. It is to remove barriers which prevent something. Those barriers have been removed. The people who asked for it originally were Canberra Cabs. They wanted to put on minibuses to run from Parliament House to the airport. The legislative and regulatory barriers have been removed.
Mrs Dunne: All of them?
MR HARGREAVES: My understanding is that the legislative and regulatory barriers have been removed in the sense that, for example, Deane’s Buslines already operate on that system. The government cannot force a private concern such as the airport to take business into their business precinct. We cannot force the airport to allow Canberra Cabs, for example, to operate their demand-responsive transport minibuses outside the airport itself. That is an arrangement that has to be struck between Canberra Cabs or whatever trading name they have this week and the airport. There is nothing we can do about it. We have removed any regulatory and legislative barrier for them to operate. If the marketplace does not pick that up, there is nothing much we can do about it. We have freed up the whole lot, with the support of this Assembly, in that piece of legislation.
We have been accused of not doing much in the whole of this system, particularly the taxi industry. I have articulated in this place 100 times what we have done about the wheelchair-accessible system. I have told this place how in recent times we created the standards that we will apply to Canberra Cabs. Similar standards apply to demand-responsive transport. Last night’s crash whereby 100 people’s bookings were lost, whether they missed aeroplanes or not, created havoc round the place. As I said earlier, the dependence on this particular system is not good enough. It has been being introduced for 12 months or more and I do not think anybody finds that acceptable.
We have been very tolerant in giving them extra time to get the system up. We have been very reasonable, in the interests of natural justice, in not applying the standards in too short a time frame. I have announced in the media and to the public which ones they have satisfied and which ones they have not. However, it appears to us, particularly anecdotally, that people just cannot get their messages through to the booking system. There are two things people want. They want to have their booking actually received by somebody and then have a cab turn up. It is not rocket science. That is all they want.
Right now, what seems to be within our power to change is whether they can get a booking service. To that end, today my department—I approved the process, curiously enough, two days ago—has written to Aerial Consolidated Transport indicating to them that I consider that providing the option of an operator service is a necessary component of a taxi booking service and that we might just put a new clause into part 5 of the minimum service standards to bring that into effect. In a sense, we are asking the operator, in shorthand terms, to show cause why we should not legislate that there has to be a human being on the other end of the phone.
We have given them plenty of time. We have introduced the standards and we have introduced penalties. We are now saying to them that we might just do that, too, if they do not get their act together. In terms of the other network, we are saying to them that there are things that they have to do that the community demands. Probity is one.
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