Page 1050 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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designed Canberra for the car. That is a fact I was not aware of, and I do not think anyone else in Canberra was aware of that fact. It is completely incorrect.
Congestion is a problem that concerns the ACT Greens, just like it does the other parties. Congestion impacts on the liveability of Canberra as well as productivity. The central facet about congestion from my point of view is the question about the best way to tackle congestion. The Greens have emphasised many times before that we can make significant reductions in congestion by planning and investing in excellent public transport systems. This has been done across the world and in cities across Australia. We have a number of examples in Australia where that has been used as a way to address congestion, particularly when there is significant population growth in city areas. That has been the approach taken by other cities.
On this note, I will quote from the light rail submission to Infrastructure Australia prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2008:
Canberra’s current transport system is unsustainable. Canberra has the highest carbon emissions from passenger car transport per capita of any Australian capital city and the growing levels of congestion which are projected to increase are imposing a cost on the ACT community in economic, environmental and social terms. These costs will continue to grow. Therefore, improvements need to be made to the current transport system.
The submission goes on to conclude that congestion and the cost of congestion is expected to grow considerably over the next 30 years. Without intervention now, Canberra’s transport environment and traffic is destined to resemble those currently being experienced in the more populous capital cities of Australia. In the context of congestion, this proposal, therefore, is not one of fixing of problems but, with the aid of the hindsight experiences of Sydney and Melbourne, is a project that will enable the nation’s capital to avoid a problem.
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ analysis shows how a light rail system will make a major contribution to reducing congestion in Canberra and help us to avoid the problems plaguing other cities. The solution does not have to be light rail; there can also be other forms of public transport, such as rapid bus services. Obviously in Brisbane we have seen a huge amount of work done in that respect. The interesting thing with Brisbane is that they have actually built it to accommodate light rail in the future, something which we can also do here. Easing congestion is one of the many reasons the Greens constantly call for more effort and more investment to be put into public transport in Canberra.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): The question is that the motion be agreed to. Chief Minister, you are not drawing the chair’s attention to the state of the house, are you?
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Health and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services) (4.10): It is interesting that this is a motion that is so important to the Canberra Liberals and there is actually not one of them here to support this motion through their attendance today. I do not want to draw the Assistant Speaker’s attention to the state of the house, but I find it interesting that on
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