Page 2462 - Week 06 - Thursday, 24 June 2010
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Mr Coe: Not even Klaus believed you.
MR HARGREAVES: Which Klaus are we talking about—Santa Claus?
Mrs Dunne: Klaus.
MR HARGREAVES: Good. Madam Assistant Speaker, let me tell you, there is a little bit of going back here. I will tell you about the bus service before Labor came to power in this place. I can tell you what the bus service needed. It did not have an effective 333 route. The Liberals boasted about it, but it did not have anything like a proper system. It had, in fact, a zonal fare system. It was a zonal unfair system, as it turned out.
Mr Coe: Are you going to have a zonal system under the new ticketing system?
MR HARGREAVES: No. I have to say, Madam Assistant Speaker, that the people of Canberra said, “We don’t like you, Liberals, so we’re going to kick you out. We want to have one fare anywhere,” like Mr Corbell introduced when he was a minister. And that is what they did—they tossed them. We also did not have priority lanes for buses. We do now. We did not have particularly good bus stops. In fact, they were particularly bad bus stops, but these guys just ignored all that. Mr Coe asked Mr Stanhope when was the last time he went on a bus. My question to those opposite—not counting standing outside here waiting to go down to VIP pies—is: when was the last time you saw a bus? I do not know whether you know what one looks like. They are those really big things—the big green ones.
When those guys opposite were in office, all of the buses were orange. There were no natural-gas-powered buses at all. Not one of those guys’ buses was looking towards being environmentally friendly. Now we are exploring and looking at Euro diesel. We are trying to make sure that we have got the best environmentally-friendly engines in the place. They talk about the inefficiencies in the system. It was this government that started to introduce replacement engines to prolong the life of the buses from eight years to 12.
Madam Assistant Speaker, you raised the point—I think it was yesterday or the day before—about how old the trams were in Melbourne and you were bemoaning the fact that our buses have a fairly short lifespan. We recognise that because of the number of kilometres they do in a year. It was this government that introduced an engine replacement program to extend the life of those buses. When we did, we also looked at the replacement of the buses themselves to make sure that they were, firstly, CNG and, secondly, Euro diesel if we could get it. Thirdly, we had to have 50 per cent of the fleet disability friendly by 2012. I arranged for 100 per cent of them to be disability friendly.
Halfway through 2001, when Mr Coe was going from kindergarten 1 to kindergarten 2, there was none of that. We have double the amount—that is a bit of a loose phrase. We have increased incredibly the number of seats and shades at bus stops. We have got enclosed bus stops at no cost to the taxpayer. We have taken the Fred Flintstone bus service from this lot into the modern era, and all they can do is say, “Oh, this is not a good system.”
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