Page 2774 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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However, I am particularly concerned that the REDEX trial will only operate for a few months. I note that the government, in responding to the estimates committee report, supported in principle recommendation 83—that the trial be structured in a way that, if shown to be successful, could simply continue, and that ongoing funding would need to be factored in to the outyears, which has not happened to date.
1 note that the government seems to take the view that the benchmarking management used to criticise the cost and efficiency of its own service has been labelled “commercial-in-confidence”. If you want to make the argument to the Canberra population that a better bus service could be provided if things were organised differently then you need to be up-front about the basis on which that claim is being made. I think it would be a useful tool even with the commercial-in-confidence elements removed.
It seems obvious to me that we want ACTION to grow. And if we want to make it a part of a system which links with other buses and other transport providers then we need to put all the information on the table. We need to have a plan for transport that links the services together. We need to have a city that is engineered with public transport in mind. We need to have the costs associated with the service up front. We need to make sure that all the contributors, including passengers, drivers, owners and operators, are invited to be part of the solution. And we need to see that shaped up over the next year or so.
I recognise that some important progress is being made with the REDEX trial and the new ticketing system, but the Greens are looking for a more visionary, more forward looking, approach.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (9.19): There are a number of areas to cover in such a large portfolio, but I will just touch on a few of them. I think Mr Coe has covered a number of them very well. One of the issues that was certainly of concern was the issue around accountability measures in ACTION. I refer to the contradiction between what we had in the evidence given to the committee and what was actually given to us by the Auditor-General later on.
It is worth reading from part of the committee’s report on this. For members’ benefit, this went to the difference in the timeliness measure, which had dropped from 99-point-something per cent to around 83 per cent. Mr Coe asked questions about it. Obviously, it seemed like a very massive drop. We were informed that the timeliness measure had changed, that the way of assessing this timeliness measure had changed from whether a bus left the depot on time—the 99 per cent—and the 83 per cent, which was something different. I think it was taking into account the different stops. When we asked questions on this, we were told that this was an Auditor-General’s figure. We were told that very clearly. In fact, Mr Elliott said:
… you cannot guarantee a figure anything other than 83 per cent. In fact, this is an Auditor-General’s figure, not ours. This is what they think the timeliness measure should be.
Ms Burch asked the question:
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