Page 3575 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 20 November 2007
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lifetime,” while on the other hand we have a sustainable transport plan that says it is a short-term priority.
The government now need to clarify whether they have allocated $115 million. And that is the figure they have given us; we know that if they were to go ahead with it that it would blow out to well above that, as we have seen with most of their infrastructure projects, whether it is the prison or the GDE. We could expect that it would blow out.
But if we move to the medium to long-term plans, we see mention of further development of trunk busways—the further development of Gungahlin to Civic, Belconnen to Civic, Woden to Civic and Tuggeranong to Woden busways and bus priority measures. So we either have a sustainable transport plan that is not worth the paper it is written on, that is not worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars that would have been expended on putting it together by the former planning minister, or we have a Labor Party plan for a $500 million to $600 million network of busways. It is one or the other.
The current minister needs to clarify the status of this plan. He referred to the plan in his speech. He said that this government has ideas and that Mr Pratt should have been referring more to the sustainable transport plan. Is this document still the plan or is it not worth the paper it is written on? If it is worth the paper it is written on, if we can accept it at face value, not only can we now expect a busway to be constructed between Belconnen and Civic over the next few years, at a cost conservatively of $115 million, and potentially much more, but also we could expect in the next few terms, if the Labor Party were to be re-elected, that we would see hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps $500 million to $600 million, expended on busways connecting the town centres.
This is the government’s plan. It is there in black and white in their sustainable transport plan. John Hargreaves now needs to say whether that is still the plan, whether they have a $500 million to $600 million plan for busways, whether they have a short-term plan for a Belconnen to Civic busway, or whether we can throw this plan away and not refer to it or to any of the measures in the sustainable transport plan again. Mr Hargreaves now needs to clarify that position.
I will also refer to Mr Hargreaves’s position on transport. He referred to some of the measures to try and get people out of cars. Of course, we know that under this government’s plans it is much more about the stick approach to getting people out of their cars. We have seen their draft parking strategy, which is simply about taking people’s car parks away from them to force them onto the substandard public transport system that we have in the ACT. Instead of doing the hard work, they are prepared to simply punish car users. They have no regard for the kind of impact that has on young families in particular—young mothers juggling work and family and trying to get to work. Often they get to work after the early times when they need to get there in many of our town centres in order to get a car park.
This government deliberately says to those young mothers, “We will take your car park away because then maybe you will catch a bus.” For many of these people, it simply will not happen. We know that John Hargreaves is on the record as saying, in
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