Page 198 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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happen overnight and we need reliable transport to get people home safely and not encourage them down the path of thinking they will risk it and perhaps drink and drive.
However, there are important provisos to our support for the courtesy transport initiative. Firstly, the government cannot use this proposed requirement for courtesy transport to hand over all responsibility for providing transport options. There will need to be a balance between public transport and venue-provided transport. To get the most out of these systems, the two will need to work together, quite literally. There will need to be a targeted strategy to ensure that venue-supplied transport delivers people to places where they can then access public transport to get to their home region. The initiative will be totally counterproductive if it simply results in people being taken from venues around Canberra and dropped in Civic only to find there are no public transport options for them. Then they get on those same problematic taxi queues.
This requirement for the government to remain involved in public transport is set against the backdrop of the Nightrider bus service. This is a government-run late-night bus service between the major interchanges. It is, however, only run a couple of weekends each year in December and on New Year’s Eve. The statistics show a promising number of people using the service, which would only grow were people able to rely on the service to run throughout the year.
Nightrider is a success story that shows the demand for reliable public transport late at night and the ongoing need for the government to remain involved in providing the service. The ongoing and regular service offered by Nightrider into the night is the model of public transport the Greens support and is contrasted with the surge model of transport required under a lockout scenario.
The Greens set out the need for better public transport in our discussion paper and we received strong support for our idea. One of the important points made in submissions was that there are various models of industry-supported transport. Two notable examples are contained in the text of the motion: venue-supplied courtesy transport and industry-subsidised transport. The government needs to investigate which of these models would suit the ACT the best given our make-up of venues and capacity to contribute to each scheme. The model adopted needs to be fully researched and found to be the one most suited to ACT conditions. The proposal needs this work to ensure that it is successful and does create the better late-night public transport service that we need.
I would like to touch briefly on live music. The motion also calls on the government to ensure that live music venues are encouraged and not deterred from operating in Canberra. This goes towards creating a vibrant nightlife because live music is an important part of the nightlife and must be embraced under the proposed new licensing framework. This section of the motion stems from recent concerns in Victoria where live music venues have been put under financial pressure from that state’s risk-based licensing framework. The ACT has the opportunity to learn from the difficulties in Victoria and to give live music venues the support they deserve.
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