Page 3438 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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to reform ACTION so that we are getting a better return on investment. Better return on investment means more people, a better environment and less congestion. It means so much, yet this government is unwilling to make the tough decisions.
In addition to the overall issues with the ACTION network, you have the great promise that Mr Corbell came out with in the 2004-05 budget that we will have a real-time solution; we will have real-time information for ACTION buses. How many times has this press release, written in 2005, been copied and pasted? Once again, this year we have the grand promise of real-time information for ACTION buses. This is something they keep promising, they keep spending money on, yet no person in Canberra actually has access to the service.
It is like so many of Minister Corbell’s ideas—they never quite get off the ground, yet they spend a lot of money doing it. This year $423,000 is listed in budget paper 3 for real-time bus information. Are we actually going to get a single bit of geographical information as a result of that $423,000 on top of all the money they have spent in the years to date? It is interesting that budget paper 3, page 115, also states there is no funding for the MyWay centres in Civic and Belconnen beyond 2013.
In addition to the huge expenditure on ACTION there are, of course, many other areas in TAMS, and I will touch on just a few of those in the limited time I have. Budget paper 4 on page 106 mentions some of the different targets that the directorate and the government have for their performance indicators. One of those is the percentage of territory roads which have been resurfaced and also the percentage of municipal roads which have been resurfaced. Each year I have been in this place—I imagine it may well be each year of this government—the percentage of the territory roads resurfaced and municipal roads resurfaced is not up to speed. The target for territory roads was five per cent, but the outcome was only four per cent, therefore, we are down 20 per cent. So 20 per cent of the roads in the ACT that were meant to be resurfaced over the last year were not. For the municipal roads the target was four per cent and the outcome was three per cent, so 25 per cent of the municipal roads which were meant to be resurfaced were not.
It is all very well for this government to blame the weather, but every single business, every single legitimate organisation, factors in that information. How is it that we blame the weather this year, yet a couple of years ago in drought they did not reach the targets of territory and municipal roads being resurfaced? It does not matter whether it is sunny or whether it is raining; this government cannot deliver, yet they have a new excuse every time.
Budget paper 4, page 106, refers to waste going to landfill, with a target of 0.7 tonnes per person now up to 0.84 tonnes per person. This is going up once again to 0.88 tonnes. I would think this would be a critical indicator for a government and a crossbench in an agreement which supposedly has a huge focus on the environment. Over the course of just 24 months we are seeing the amount of waste going to landfill increasing by more than 20 per cent per person. This is a chronic failure of this government. Indeed, the Greens have not held the government to account on this indicator because each year during this parliamentary agreement this indicator has got worse—each year. It is all very well for the Greens to say, “Isn’t that a shame,” but
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