Page 4097 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015
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Ultimately, we need to stop thinking about the delivery of public transport provision in the context of a government bus company designing its own network and delivering its own services to its own service standards. Instead transport Canberra is there to identify what the standards should be, the levels of frequency and reliability and the overall network planning to meet growth and demand as Canberra itself grows.
The service providers, whether it be ACTION or whether it be the preferred provider of the light rail service, will need to meet those standards. That is the great opportunity presented to us with the establishment of capital metro—moving to that multiple service provider, trying to address and respond to key performance criteria and key network planning decisions made by an agency dedicated to that task; not the day-to-day operational tasks of public transport provision but through the strategic planning tasks. That, of course, is one of the great and significant steps that come from the establishment of transport Canberra.
I commend Mr Gentleman for his amendment. It highlights the importance of the steps that the government is seeking to take to deliver better public transport for our city, and it is of course a much more considered and thoughtful approach than we see from those opposite.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (10.51): I will conclude debate on both the amendment and the original motion. It is hard to know where to begin when you have such content provided or such content sparked by those opposite. One thing I do want to note, of course, is the difference between Mr Rattenbury’s speech versus Mr Gentleman’s. For all Mr Rattenbury’s faults, as we would see, at least his speeches are consistent. They are always consistent. He is always banging on for the Greens cause, and good on him for doing that.
In contrast, if you compare Mr Gentleman’s speech today to his speech yesterday in response to a question on Majura Parkway, you will see a complete contradiction in their approach. One, of course, is that we need to build more roads; roads are great; roads ease congestion. This was obviously written by Roads ACT. Then you have today’s speech, which is all anti-roads and about roads leading to congestion.
Someone upstairs really does need to make sure these speeches come into harmony a little bit. Yesterday it was all about how Majura Parkway is going to ease pressure on the road network; it is going to reduce travel time from 20 minutes down to seven minutes; congestion is going to be avoided as a result of road construction. Today it is the opposite. We are told that you cannot keep on building more roads. Roads lead to congestion. Roads simply fill up. There does need to be some finessing, I think, of Mr Gentleman’s speeches.
It is interesting to hear Mr Rattenbury talk about the opposition’s objections to the original Redex, as it was then. In committee hearings, when I put to ACTION that it is not really an express, it is not really a rapid express, eventually they did acknowledge that it is not, because it is stopping at least 14 times. Therefore, it is not really an express. And it was not really rapid at the time either, because it was not actually going particularly frequently.
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