Page 1211 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 7 May 2014
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Let me make several points to flesh out that argument. Firstly, let me draw attention to the position of the Canberra Liberals on light rail at an earlier time. This was in 2011, before the capital metro project had been adopted by the current government. Here is what Mr Seselja, the former leader, said to the Assembly:
I believe, like most Canberrans, I think, that light rail is a good idea.
Mr Seselja went on to criticise the previous studies done by government on light rail, in particular that it had not spent enough money on the studies. He criticised the Labor and Greens parties for a lack of action on light rail, saying:
But they are not prepared to do the study; they are not prepared to do the work. They promise it at every election … And they will have to look the electorate in the eye and tell them why they did not get it done.
What an irony then, that now, as the government makes solid progress on light rail—with my strong support—the Liberal Party revises its position. Its position now appears to be, “Stop doing the study, stop doing the work and abandon the project.” As has been noted in this Assembly before, Mrs Dunne also has expressed what I would characterise as strong support for light rail. In fact she documented it in a published paper. Mrs Dunne wrote:
Despite its car-centred infrastructure, Canberra could shift commuting patterns through a light rail system linking its constituent nodes.
She argued that Canberra can change its reliance on the car for ordinary commuting and “the obvious answer is a light rail system, or adaptation of transit oriented development”.
Other parts of Mrs Dunne’s paper note that the arguments in favour of light rail are strong. She points out that medium-sized cities with a comparable population to Canberra’s have light rail systems which work better than bus-only systems. She lightly chastises Labor governments for not being willing to outlay large amounts of money on important capital projects. She concluded by saying:
My suggestion for Canberra is that by taking into account the city’s unique profile, we can devise an integrated urban design policy that would give meaning to the notion of a “sustainable city”: one in which the development of a light rail transit system would play a crucial part.
Again, how ironic it is that now that the light rail project is finally progressing, and progressing well, the Liberal Party quickly reinvents itself as the arch-enemy of light rail. Never mind what Mr Seselja or Mrs Dunne may have said, the key for the Canberra Liberals now is to find every way they can to denigrate light rail as part of a contrived political attack on the government.
The points Mr Coe makes in his motion elucidate a one-sided and misinformed approach to this project. I will touch on several of them by way of illustration. Point (1)(b), for example, states that other routes in a potential ACT-wide network were not
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