Page 5180 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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information.” I wonder when we are actually going to get the real-time information. There is nothing real-time about Mr Corbell’s announcement. If there was a real-time sign at the bus stop with regard to Simon Corbell’s policy, it would be “six years and counting”. That sums up just how ineffective this government has been.
Of course, there are very significant IR issues at ACTION and this government seems totally unwilling to tackle these issues. We are still waiting for network 2 of 2006. That was the weekend timetable. That was the one that Mr Hargreaves, when he was the transport minister, said was going to come, was going to reform ACTION buses and was going to turn it into a seven-day operation. We are still waiting for network 2 of 2006.
Real-time is another one of Simon Corbell’s failures. Here we are, still waiting. We are still waiting.
Mr Smyth: That bus has not arrived yet. It is running late.
MR COE: It is interesting that Mr Smyth should joke, “The bus has not arrived yet.” When it comes to dead running, this government really has let every single Canberran down. Through questions on notice, the answers to which I got back last year, in March 2010, it came back that per week day an empty ACTION bus drives 12,665 kilometres or, as it works out, about every four days an empty ACTION bus goes around the world at the equator. These are just the absolutely empty ones at the start and beginning of a route. What about all the other buses which are near to empty, with just one passenger on board or maybe two? We are talking tens of thousands of kilometres per week of extreme inefficiencies.
It is interesting that, when I put in questions on notice to this government about things that are going to be embarrassing, often the responses are delayed. Often they are incomplete. Often you get a note back saying that it will be too hard to calculate this answer. Not with this one. This one, I reckon, would have been hard to calculate. This one would have taken a bit of time.
Yet the government, through Mr Stanhope, was pretty keen to give it to me. He was pretty keen for me to expose just how inefficient ACTION was. For a while there, when Mr Stanhope was the Chief Minister, I think he found it quite convenient that I was out there pointing out inefficiencies in ACTION, because he did not have the guts to do it. Regularly he came out and said: “ACTION is a disaster. We need wholesale reform at ACTION.” But he never actually did it. And that was why he was always very willing for me to go out and bag out ACTION and bag out the inefficiencies there. At no point did Mr Stanhope actually have a go at me during that process. Why? Because he knew that what I was saying about the inefficiencies in the ACTION bus network were true.
The difference is, now Simon Corbell is at the helm, now he is driving the bus, he actually thinks everything is just fine at ACTION. He thinks running $85 million a year for an eight per cent patronage rate is all right. He thinks that is the sort of thing which leads to good governance and to a good public transport system.
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