Page 616 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Nurses at the hospital now take two hours to get home after working a shift. They work a long shift; they do hard work; and because of the changes to the buses it now takes nurses who finish work at about 3 o’clock and who live in Tuggeranong two hours to get home, when it once took them an hour. The taking of two hours to get places where it once took them 40 minutes or an hour is the real problem for people in Canberra.
A girl came to me recently when I was out in the community. She lives in the Tuggeranong Valley and works in Kingston. She works on Saturday in Kingston. She is supposed to start work at quarter to 9 in the morning. She had been, for some time, able to get to work from the Tuggeranong Valley to Kingston and start work by quarter to 9. With the changes to the bus service, she now cannot get to work until quarter to 10. Her indulgent employer has said, “That is all right. We will let you start at quarter to 10 rather than quarter to 9.” But if something goes wrong with those connections, she does not get to work until quarter to 11. I fear that people like that will not be able to keep their jobs because of the poor services provided by the bus system.
I was discussing this particular issue at home with my children. My daughter, who works in Kingston, pointed out that she, coming from Belconnen, has to leave home at quarter past 8 on Saturday morning if she is to start work at 11 o’clock in Kingston.
Mr Mulcahy: You could drive to Sydney in that time.
MRS DUNNE: So if there is not a car available in our household for my daughter to drive to work—and she is quite happy to take the bus; it gives her time to read a book on the way, do some uni reading and that sort of thing—
Mr Mulcahy: She could read the Bible on that journey.
MRS DUNNE: She could drive to Sydney; she could read large slabs of the Bible—
Mr Seselja: Or War and Peace.
MRS DUNNE: She probably has got through most of War and Peace, which I think is on the reading list. It is an unreasonable time when you know that, on a good day, it probably takes you about—tops—half an hour to drive from Evatt to Kingston. This is what will happen. We will see people discouraged from using the buses.
We know that the minister is not prepared to take my advice and is not prepared to take the advice of the Transport Workers Union. We know that there are considerable problems in the bus service and that there are issues of safety which this minister does not seem to have addressed. There has been a stabbing and an assault of bus personnel in just over a week. There is an outrageous amount of danger on the buses. People complain to me—and I have written to the minister about people’s concerns—about the level of safety at the Woden interchange. No sooner had I written to the minister about patrons’ concerns about it than we had an incident where a supervisor was stabbed.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .