Page 3570 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 20 November 2007
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enormous injection of funds. The biggest one recently has been $75 million. Today I opened the Gungahlin Drive extension bridge over Belconnen Way. That is a $7 million bridge. You can now travel on that road all the way from the Barton Highway to Aranda. That piece of infrastructure, to which Mr Pratt did not refer in his MPI speech, is now open, and we are on schedule to open the lot in the middle of next year.
We have a sustainable transport plan. We have signages on our bike paths and we have a bike path maintenance program. We have pedestrian programs and motorcycle programs. We have concessions for environmentally friendly vehicles. With all of those things, we have got rubber on the road. But what have they got? What is the transport policy of the alternative government? It is now 20 November 2007. The only thing we can find, after a good old-fashioned trawl, is their platform of July 2004. Mr Pratt has been in his current guise—and I use that word advisedly—of shadow transport minister since 2004. Has he been able to articulate anything new?
Mr Seselja: Correct the record.
MR HARGREAVES: No, he has not. What are they going to do about alternative options for vehicle use? Their platform says they will “investigate and encourage alternative options for vehicle use”. Well, what are they? Nothing, Mr Speaker. They are going to reserve transport corridors for future development, Mr Seselja. It says so here. If it is not the policy of your lot over there, what is it doing in your policy? There is a strip of land down Belconnen Way for either a specific busway later on or for a light rail later on. It is called reserving transport corridors, Mr Seselja. If you do not believe it, get it out of your policy, or people will think you are part of my lot.
It talks about “promoting shared means of travel and travel blending as the preferred form of commuting”. What have we seen from that? Has the shadow transport minister encouraged people to do things like make use of our park-and-ride policy and our three-for-free policy, which are about public transport and the infrastructure which supports it? What have we seen? Nothing. This is what they are going to do: they are going to plan and they are going to promote. They are going to reserve a transport corridor and they are going to ensure that planning of new suburbs takes account of the requirement to provide high-quality links for major travel demands. Nobody in the whole country understands what they mean by it.
This July 2004 platform takes up three-quarters of one page. The executive summary of Mr Corbell’s 2001-04 sustainable transport plan beats that. That is a pathetic piece of work. Do you know what it is, Mr Speaker? This shadow transport minister has the temerity to get up here, during an MPI discussion on transport and transport infrastructure, and talk about nothing more than violence at an interchange. Did he acknowledge that it was a partnership between the community and an ACTION bus driver which enabled the police to receive enough information to apprehend a person hurling a rock at a bus? No, he did not. Did he acknowledge the work that transport workers in those interchanges are doing to keep the violence down? No, he did not.
All he is saying is: “Oops, we’ve got ourselves a thing here. It’s not getting itself into reports, so the government clearly is not doing anything, because this is rampant.” If
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