Page 3852 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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or, as the focus of my contribution will be today, the ACTION commuter nightmare. The reality of transport options in Canberra is far from as glowing as the government press releases would say they are or as Mr Porter’s speech would suggest.
The ACT government are the sole providers of commuter and school bus services in Canberra. It is pretty amazing that we still get this government that seem to distance themselves from every problem relating to ACTION despite the fact that they are the sole providers of bus services in the ACT. They alone must take responsibility for the situation that we are in.
There is an organisation that is established to help generate interest in ACTION, and some of the things that they list as being of concern are things like waiting 30 minutes for a bus that never actually comes, being late for work because the bus is late, having weekend plans delayed because of reduced bus services on the weekend, not being able to get home past 10 o’clock. I know that you cannot get a bus from the city to a number of suburbs in Gungahlin beyond 6 o’clock at night. It is absolutely amazing that you have to go through Belconnen—you have to go through the disaster which is the Belconnen bus station situation at the moment.
It is interesting that in estimates this year we heard that one in five ACTION buses are expected to run late. They had a target of 99.9 per cent, and they got 83 per cent. Then we found out that the way they measured figures in previous years at the start of the year was different to how they measured the figures at the end of the year. They did not, however, actually know that at the time. It was only a day or two later that they actually clarified that they did not know how it was measured, how it should have been measured, and how it was actually measured. It is a pretty special operation that the ACT government is running when it comes to ACTION, because it does not seem to be pleasing anyone at all.
I do not know too many people who have the option of driving but who actually choose to get a bus. The vast majority of people who get a bus in the ACT get a bus because they are forced to. They are forced to take a bus instead of a car, because they either do not have a car or, for financial reasons, they cannot afford to run it. When is it going to get to a point when getting a bus is actually preferable? That has got to be the aim of this government—that is, getting a bus to work, to your destination, is preferable. I do not know anyone in Canberra who would actually say at the moment that that is their number one preference of transport.
In spite of the fact that one in five buses runs late—I would not be surprised to see that figure increase even more—we have got bus fares going up and up and up as services get worse and worse and worse. This year we saw a headline rise of 11 per cent, but that 11 per cent actually hid the true cost of further increases for some communities. Tertiary students saw an increase of 49 per cent in the cost of getting on a bus. If you are a student and you are currently driving to university or driving to CIT, why would you then get on a bus when fares have just gone up by 49 per cent? What incentive is there for a student to stop driving their car—which is apparently the objective of this government—and to get on a bus, when it was 49 per cent more expensive on 1 July than it was the day before?
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