Page 3420 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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place, people will still be using cars in the future and, whether they are running on oil, whether they are running on electricity, whether they are running on water or anything else, people are going to be driving cars. In fact, Canberrans will continue to rely on cars well into the future because cars are a means of getting around which does not rely on a government to continue to deliver services directly to people. Cars are individual families making decisions, and the Canberra population will continue to rely on cars. Even if the most heroic assumptions under the sustainable transport plan are met in 2026, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority, of Canberra families will rely on the car to get around.
I think that is the reality at the heart of Mr Coe’s motion. It is saying, yes, we should be developing a better public transport system. Yes, we should be giving people options. Yes, we should be doing all we can to improve those options. But even if you do that, even if you do it very well, the vast bulk of people will still use their cars. Therefore simply squeezing car parks, simply taking the approach of having fewer car parks in the ACT, is not the way to go, because all that that does is inconvenience people. They will still drive their cars. It is far less convenient to do so. It means that Canberrans end up paying more money for the privilege of parking and end up having to walk further to get to their place of work once they have parked their car. But for the vast bulk of those people, it will not actually get them out of their cars, because they will do the numbers and they will look at the options and their car will still stack up better.
This is particularly true of families in the outer suburbs whom the Greens and Labor look to punish with their policies. We need to go over some of those policies, such as the spatial plan which talks about the changes to parking policies to minimise the use of private motor vehicles for commuting. So that is about squeezing car parks. That is about deliberately making it harder for Canberrans to park. That is the stated policy of this government, and the problem that they face is that the families in the outer suburbs are going to continue to rely on their cars.
The mother who needs to drop one child at day care and one child at school before going off to work is going to use the car. No bus service will be able to deliver what that mother needs to take a child to day care and to go to a separate location to take a child to school, to drop by the shops and to then go to work. No bus service is going to provide enough variety and enough breadth in order to allow that mother, whether she lives in Tuggeranong or Gungahlin or west Belconnen or Weston Creek, to be able, conveniently and in a timely manner, to do all of the things that need to be done on a given day.
These are the realities, and those families need to be backed up rather than punished. This stick approach that the government seeks to take, I think, is quite hypocritical, because I do not see many members of the Labor Party or the Greens who advocate giving up their car space in the Assembly. We are privileged here to have car spaces right in the heart of the city. Getting a park in Civic is a difficult thing these days. It is an inconvenient thing often and, depending on which part of the city you work in, it is certainly an expensive thing. But it can actually be a very inconvenient thing, trying to find a car park in the city. That is why many businesses, law firms and other professional firms, are moving out of the city. It has just been so difficult. I have had lots of feedback from organisations who have done that.
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