Page 673 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.43): Mr Speaker, this is an important motion today and it is an important, dare I say, junction for the government that it has eventually come on board so that we will together make some progress to improve the bus system in the ACT.
The minister and the Chief Minister have talked about the improvements in the bus service, and there have been improvements in the bus service; nobody doubts that. The government like to selectively quote their facts. But one of the things that hides away in the back of the government’s own fact sheet about ACTION patronage is that over the last two years we have seen substantial losses in patronage from concession users, and that, Mr Speaker, is the elderly, the young and the disabled.
Over the last two years we have seen 67,000 fewer concession users on the buses. This means that the bus service is failing to provide its social justice elements. It is now becoming a bus service for the middle class, for people who have jobs, usually well-paid jobs, and who are travelling to work. I do not see that there is a problem with that; people who have simple journeys to work should be using the bus as much as possible—
Mr Stanhope: Are you going to increase the budget?
MRS DUNNE: and we should be encouraging them to do so for a whole range of reasons.
Mr Stanhope: How much more money are you going to put in?
MRS DUNNE: The other thing that we see is that, after a reasonable increase in the number of schoolchildren—
Mr Stanhope: Get that calculator out, mate.
MRS DUNNE: using the buses in 2005-06—
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MRS DUNNE: I can talk over him, Mr Speaker; it is all right. In 2006-07 26,000 fewer schoolchildren used the buses. If you lose the schoolchildren—if schoolchildren never get the idea that it is all right to use buses, that you can get around and it provides a service for you—we will have lost them for life. The culture of using public transport will be lost to a large part of the next generation, and that has real implications for the future sustainability of public transport.
Mr Hargreaves likes to talk about the 120,000 extra boardings, but when you divide that by the number of working days it is actually quite a small number—fewer than 500 people extra a day using the buses—and that is a real problem for us. There are increases in public transport use going to work, as I have said, but most of the other sectors are losing out, and we need to find ways of getting it back into kilter.
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