Page 2957 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 September 2014
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consistently we know that those are the top issues. As we have discussed in recent days, they are also the issues that are receiving more than half of the government’s overall funding, reflecting the fact that the government too is prioritising those areas.
Canberrans then next listed improving public transport as a priority. This was listed equally with the importance of improving housing affordability. That is an undeniably strong result for public transport. Canberrans recognise the benefits brought by improved public transport, and they expect the government to work on this issue for them. Again, it is an objective indicator of what Canberrans think is important. They rate improving public transport highly, as Canberrans value this service and understand the benefits improved public transport brings to the city.
There is some irony in Mr Hanson raising public transport as a matter of public importance today, because what is unfortunately clear is that public transport is not a priority for the Liberals. At the federal level, Prime Minister Abbott has made it clear that his priorities are to build roads and not to fund public transport. In fact, what he said was that he will “stick to his knitting … And the commonwealth’s knitting when it comes to funding infrastructure is roads”.
In our business-as-usual scenario, I agree that building all these roads has the potential to lead to short-term increases in productivity and decreases in congestion. But what about the long term? I would argue that with this roads focus, in the end Tony Abbott is only knitting Australia a straitjacket. We will be locked into a transport framework that is high polluting, expensive, liable to rapid congestion, susceptible to fossil fuel uncertainty, and it will be much harder to combat these problems the longer we leave them. And I fear that the local Canberra Liberals want to take us in the same direction.
Mr Abbott has promised to spend $80 billion on roads. For less than one-eightieth of this amount, Canberra could have its first stage of light rail. Imagine what we could do for Canberra if Mr Abbott and the Liberal Party gave some priority to sustainable transport instead of focusing entirely on roads.
I am also interested in the potential irony of the fact that Mr Hanson came in here today and spoke enthusiastically about bus rapid transit. I suspect if the government had decided instead to build bus rapid transit, the Canberra Liberals would be in here tearing that apart. They would either have decided for pure oppositional sake to go for the light rail, like Mrs Dunne argued in previous years, or they would simply be saying we should not be doing it at all. I am not sure which it would be, but I can almost guarantee that they would be opposed to BRT if the government had gone down that path. That is what they do. They define themselves by the notion of opposition.
When it comes to public transport priorities, I am working with the government as part of the cabinet to make sure we get Canberrans a decent alternative to the car. We need to make sure that people have got a range of options for getting around this city and for making sure that those options are constantly being improved.
We have seen improvements through network 14 with an increase in services. We are seeing concerted effort to improve the walking and cycling infrastructure in this city
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