Page 2745 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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now recommended a park and ride at Calwell. I hope that the $1.2 million committed for park and rides in this budget includes the Calwell service.
It is good to see a number of funding initiatives around the draft strategic public transport network plan, prepared for the government by consultants in 2010. These include new bus station design studies for Barton and Dickson and a design for a city lay-over bus facility. It is also positive to see that there will now be investigation into bus stops for Adelaide Avenue and further work to implement transport corridors and transit-oriented development.
I also want to acknowledge that, through the estimates process, the government now appears to be saying that it will start providing bus services to new developments early, rather than leaving these new residents with no public transport options. The Greens have been arguing for this improvement, and we will be monitoring this closely to ensure it occurs.
While these are positive initiatives, and the Greens of course support them, we do have questions about the overall balancing of the budget in terms of sustainable transport. Transport is one of the major recipients of capital works funding. Like other recent budgets, this budget invests heavily in new infrastructure for Canberra. In fact, the expenditure for the 2011-12 financial year for new work and work in progress is estimated to be around $824 million. That is about 15 per cent higher than the previous year’s expenditure, which was also a record.
What is not increasing is the funding being put into capital infrastructure for sustainable transport. The vast majority of the transport money is still spent on business-as-usual transport spending—that is, transport initiatives that support and entrench the current patterns of travel in Canberra. As we know, these are not sustainable patterns and they need to change. The Greens raised the continuing poor results in modal shift in the Assembly just last week.
The ACIL Tasman report comments on the achievability of our 40 per cent greenhouse reduction targets. It reiterates the point that achieving the legislated reduction is a considerable challenge, particularly given the relatively short time frame. It points specifically to the need for behavioural change. What is needed to help meet this significant challenge is a correspondingly significant change in our approach to transport funding and planning. The Greens are concerned that we are not seeing this to the degree required.
What we are seeing with the proposal for a Majura freeway is an entrenching of existing unsustainable transport patterns. I have already pointed out the inaccuracy of the claim that building the Majura freeway has nothing to do with modal shift targets, and to pretend that it will not impact them, a claim that Mr Corbell made in question time last week—this is a project that has not been properly scrutinised in terms of its sustainability impacts on Canberra. Last week I put forward a motion that asked for scrutiny of some very concerning issues around the Majura freeway. The government and the Liberal Party both refused this. This is remiss of the other parties, and unjustifiable, especially considering the gravity of the issues the Greens raised and the amount of ACT taxpayers’ money that the government is proposing to spend.
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