Page 4211 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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government felt that in order to properly investigate a busway between Civic and Belconnen you need $5 million, are you really going to get a fair dinkum study for $200,000? I think that goes to the seriousness of this government on this issue.
This government loves announcements. There is another Labor government it reminds me of—a recently departed Labor government that was notorious by the end for promises on public transport that it did not keep. I refer to New South Wales Labor. New South Wales Labor promised rail lines to the north-west and to the south-west, and it failed to deliver. But before every election it said it was going to do it. We are seeing that pattern here with ACT Labor: before every election it says it is committed to light rail—really it is; hand on heart, it wants to see light rail be a reality. But do not believe it. Let us just be honest about it: it is not committed to it. It is not even committed to properly studying it.
That goes to my amendment. My amendment goes to what we spoke about before the last election and I think it is worth reflecting on that. I believe, like most Canberrans, I think, that light rail is a good idea. It is very expensive and, if we are going to go down that path, a lot of things need to happen. First, we need to do the serious study—not a pretend study. We need to do a serious study that looks at all of the possible economic benefits and economic costs, all of the social benefits, the environmental benefits and the environmental costs. There are costs and benefits of all these things. But let us do a serious study. Let us seriously engage with the community.
One of the planks of our policy was to do a transport users census, to do a serious study of what the take-up might be like. You cannot do that if you just do a quick and dirty study. That is no reflection on the people who did the study; they simply were not resourced to do it properly, as comprehensively as would be needed for a multibillion dollar project.
Secondly, we need to start developing our city in a way that might underpin light rail. If we look around the world where rail works, it tends to work best where there are a lot of people living in one place. It sounds novel, but that is the way it goes. Canberra is not that city at the moment. Will it be more like that in five years time or 10 years time? Will we seriously develop along our transport corridors and in our town centres so that maybe we have a much better bus system or maybe we are able to support a light rail system? These are the questions.
I again go to the duplicity of the government and the Greens on this. They claim they want to see more people living on transport corridors, more people living in town centres. But what do they do? They go and impose a massive tax on that very type of development. They impose a tax on the kind of development they say they want—but not on the other type of development. That is a pretty big market signal that the government are saying, “We would prefer you to develop just in the greenfields.” And, if that is the case, we of course will never, ever be able to sustain a light rail system. We will not, unless we develop our city in the way that it should be developed, and that is through sensible growth around our transport corridors and our major centres. That will underpin a much better public transport system.
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