Page 615 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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transport system to allow them to get around this territory. In addition, there are people who are infirm or who choose not to drive, for a variety of reasons.
Fifty per cent of Canberrans at any one time do not drive. Many of those people do not have family members who drive or who have access to a car, and they rely upon the public transport system. Many families rely on the public transport system to get their children to school, to get their children to their weekend or after-school jobs and a range of other things. Students who have finished school and who are at university and colleges rely upon public transport to get them to lectures and to get them from their lectures to their job that keeps the bread on the table, the clothes on their back or buys the books. They rely on a service that gets them around town.
Shift workers are particularly reliant upon a reliable bus service. We have at the moment a bus service which is really good if you work in a nine to five office job, and particularly good if you work in Civic, Woden, Belconnen or Russell. If you want to get to work in the morning and home in the afternoon, that is fine. But, beyond that, there is a real problem.
Everywhere I go and in every area of Canberra people come to me to complain about the problems of the bus service. Some of them bring specific complaints about failure to arrive at a particular time or how the service has changed so much that they cannot get around any more or as efficiently as they used to, which I and other members on this side have raised directly with the minister for transport. He cannot diminish the number of criticisms and complaints that have come through my office and, I know, Mr Mulcahy’s office and, I presume, other member’s offices in relation to public transport.
In addition, if you go to every public meeting, every public event, someone will bail you up to talk about how bad the public transport system is in the ACT. I will give you a few examples: in relation to schools, the children at Alfred Deakin High were hauled off the buses and told the buses were too full: “Make your own way home.”
When the students at Tuggeranong College, for which there are no dedicated school buses—the only college in the territory for which there are no dedicated school buses because, fair enough, the bus interchange is not very far away—go with their school bags and their school books to get on a route bus, because there are no school buses, they are told by drivers that they should not be using route buses, they should be using dedicated school buses and they should be using school buses to get home. However, the government does not provide buses for them. This is not a complaint that there should be buses for Lake Tuggeranong College; it is a complaint about the fact that the students at Lake Tuggeranong College are badly treated when they use the route buses.
The students at St Eddie’s find that the bus leaves St Edmund’s two minutes after the bell; so they do not have time to get out of their classroom, go to their locker, pick up their books and catch the bus before the bus leaves. The buses to St Edmund’s, St Clare’s, and some of the Belconnen high schools, like my own daughter’s high school, Canberra High, and Belconnen High, are overcrowded. These are the complaints that come to me.
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