Page 1907 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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year that Mr Barr said: “I’m not here to fund industry. I’m not the automatic teller machine of the ACT Assembly, and they’re not getting the money.” Well, under pressure from the Assembly, under pressure from the Canberra Liberals, under pressure from the community and industry, he buckled, as he does so often. He has done the backflip, and the industry have got the money they deserve. That is a good thing, too. So, there you are, Treasurer—a few ticks, but a whole lot more work needs to be done. (Time expired.)
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (3.57): Budgets are a time when governments present to their community not only their plans for financial management but also their visions for the future. Given this budget is a tight one—possibly the tightest we will have in this Assembly—worthy of examination are what the government identifies as priority areas of spending and where the Greens differ in policy on these issues.
With regard to transport, the Greens welcome the shift in focus by the government from road construction towards a more balanced approach that accepts the importance of public transport as a means of building capacity and sustainability into the future. The announcements of improved bus stations at major employment and residential centres will go some way to improving the experience of public transport, and the bus priority measures will improve timeliness of services along Canberra and Northbourne avenues. These are measures that the Greens in the Assembly, as well as other transport groups, have been calling for over many years. The ACT Greens and the Queanbeyan Greens campaigned on the Canberra Avenue transit lane during the 2008 ACT election.
However, the Greens believe that this budget does only enough to maintain the status quo. It improves services for those who currently use public transport, and should encourage more people, particularly in the north of Canberra, to start using public transport, and it will cope with small projected increases in usage dictated by factors external to ACTION such as parking and fuel prices.
There is a wealth of research and evidence that shows that improving frequency and capacity provides a substantial return on investment, not only for a particular route but across the entire network. The Redex trial, which we welcome and acknowledge the government for establishing as a permanent part of the network—and it was a part of the Greens and Labor parliamentary agreement—demonstrated this. It is disappointing that the government has not identified any further high-frequency express routes within this budget. We acknowledge there is further work coming through the work undertaken by Jarret Walker. However, this would have been the chance, due to the great success of Redex, to introduce this service to another area of Canberra such as Belconnen or Woden.
The solution to reducing congestion has typically been to build more roads. It is true that in the short term wider roads can reduce travel time, but this is never a long-term solution as in the long term new lanes congest as passengers shift from public transport to roads until a new equilibrium is reached, little or no better than the old congestion problem.
The only effective long-term solution to congestion on roads is to improve non-congestible networks in terms of frequency, capacity and timeliness. Doing so
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