Page 3566 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 20 November 2007
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I watched the docudrama Forbidden Lies. In that docudrama the tragic Norma Khouri wildly spun her way through a series of confected situations that did not exist. Like Norma’s dark Jordanian plot, a wonderfully efficient public transport system underpinned by effective integrated infrastructure does not yet exist. All the ingredients are there, but they are not cohesively organised by this government. It has neglected our public transport system.
I welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue. The opposition has long held the belief that public transport should, indeed, be underpinned by a supportive and integrated infrastructure. It is a shame the government is only just coming around to the idea, according to the latest funding injection. This comes from a government with a track record of failing to act upon the increasing violence that is occurring at interchanges and which is effectively working against trying to grow patronage.
Violence at interchanges is a key concern. Assaults on bus passengers and ACTION staff continue unabated at our interchanges because of the failure by the Stanhope government to take any effective action to stem the violence. An answer to a question on notice reflected that there were only three reported assaults on ACTION staff over the past three months. Alarmingly, the answer notes that there are no figures available for assaults on passengers. So we seem to have facts available indicating how many staff have been assaulted at bus interchanges, but nobody seems to care that we should be keeping statistics and details of the number of assaults on passengers. Why does that not matter?
This information is even more alarming, given the glaring omissions. We know that anecdotal evidence supplied to my office and through the media indicates that more than three assaults have occurred since August last year. Further, ACT police data published in the media recently says that 30 assaults occurred at bus interchanges alone in the three months between February and April this year. Now, that flies well and truly in the face of the picture painted by the minister in his answer to my question on notice about safety and security at bus interchanges.
What does this say about the data that the Stanhope government chooses to make available from ACTION? Either the incidents are not reported or the reports themselves coming out of ACTION are not taken seriously by the minister. I do not say that things are being doctored, but I have had it put to me by very, very concerned ACTION staff that what they report out of the interchanges is not necessarily reflected in the incident reports that come from the department. So it seems that either there is a misinterpretation of the facts somewhere up through the chain of command or somebody is making sure that the picture remains as rosy as it possibly can be.
Just to underpin the situation regarding safety at bus interchanges, indeed safety on buses, and the yawning gap between the information that we are getting both anecdotally into my office and through the media versus the information provided by the government to questions on notice about those very questions, I hereby table 12 media articles on the violence and disrepair at ACT interchanges. These 12 media releases refer to violence and assaults in the space of a 30-day period—I say again, in the space of a 30-day period. I seek leave to table these documents.
Leave granted.
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