Page 3854 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
One of the indicators that we do have in budget paper 4 is that the cost per kilometre has increased 12 per cent from $3.86 to $4.33. I am sure the government will cite a million reasons why this is the case. But petrol prices have gone down such that I understand that the allowance paid for motor vehicles here in the Assembly has taken that into account, and the allowance has actually gone down from last year. So if there is an admission by government agencies or by the remuneration tribunal that running costs are going down, as evidenced by the car allowance in this place, then perhaps we will actually see a substantive decrease in the cost per kilometre, whereas last year it went up by 12 per cent from $3.86 to $4.33.
Parallel to all this, of course, is the parking situation where we saw significant increases in the cost of parking—20 per cent from 1 July and 50 per cent from 1 July next year for metered operations. Again, as I said before in this place, there is nothing at all strategic about increasing the cost of parking at the same time as increasing the cost of catching a bus. When you increase both at the same point, all you are doing is slugging all commuters. It is a simple tax break. It is a simply revenue operation this government is doing to try and mask the fact that there is so much waste.
It would be remiss of me not to make mention of this week’s City News article which talks about what Minister Hargreaves said in reference to the Labor-Greens agreement. That agreement is relevant to this discussion because, of course, it talks about this pipe dream—whether it is reality, I am not sure—of a 30-minute interval for all bus services in Canberra. I do not know whether Mr Stanhope thinks it is a pipe dream, an aspiration or whether it is real. But Mr Hargreaves summed it up when he said the points in the agreement were like:
… carrots in front of the donkey; we’ll never eat them, but they will keep us moving forward.
Is the Labor-Greens agreement really going to keep us moving forward? It is certainly not going to help the Greens much if Labor do not actually do anything. They have got this pipe dream of 30 minutes. The carrot is in front of the donkey; I wonder whether the carrot is, in fact, a poorly encrypted metaphor for an orange ACTION bus—probably running late, mind you, and probably going very slowly. If there were a couple of carrots next to each other, perhaps it could be an articulated bus. You have this ACTION bus in front of the Labor Party and the Greens trying to move forward when in actual fact the government have no commitment whatsoever to ACTION. That is witnessed by just about every person in the travelling public who catches a bus. They know the buses run late. It is witnessed by just about every person who drives to work because they know that catching a bus is not an option for them. It is, of course, very disappointing that we do have a government that has such disrespect for public transport policy and such disrespect for the ACTION service.
In contrast to that, I think it is worth noting that the Deane’s Transit Group are doing a fantastic job with the operations they run from places like Yass to Murrumbateman and Hall, from Queanbeyan and other places around the region. They do a fantastic job and they do it efficiently. It is a shame that this government seems to put up road blocks for Deane’s Transit Group in getting more involved in the transport solution here in Canberra. Deane’s offer a fantastic service.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .