Page 3388 - Week 09 - Thursday, 24 August 2017
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Perhaps that is just clumsily worded. Perhaps there is not an actual issue with going to Tuggeranong and it is just an issue with going to the hospital. The fact that they say the “future southern expansion”—because really it would be an eastern expansion if it was to go from Woden to the hospital, or a western continuation if it was to go to the hospital first and then kick on to Woden—probably warrants some further questions from members of this place.
The government raised unrealistic expectations in the consultation process. Investigations along the rest of the routes are still “underway”, apparently. They have already found “constraints imposed by heritage buildings, existing sensitive landscape, radii of bends, gradient over the bridge and in other parts of the route”. Maybe they are actually referring to difficulties in going from the city down south in general. Who knows? One way or another, hopefully, the minister can clarify exactly what advice she has received as a result of this. We might just have to wait until six weeks before the next election to actually get a commitment as to what the plan is.
It is only after consultation that “the light rail stage 2 project team and the specialist technical advisory team are now performing more detailed investigations on a range of issues relating to urban design, constructability, planning, transport, economics and land use”. It is interesting that all of this is done now rather than before. You would think they would have done a preliminary level of investigation prior to doing the consultation so that they could at least try to manage expectations. Especially, if they were going to assess all the options anyway, you would think they would have done so before having gone public with the options. Either the government was reckless and irresponsible in pursuing stage 2 without finalising their investigations or the consultation was a sham. Both of those are pretty plausible, unfortunately. On behalf of Canberrans, I put the question to the government: why did they begin the consultation if all the options were not actually on the table? It is an insult to the Canberrans that took part in this process.
While money is poured into light rail, we can look at the budget expectations for ACTION buses. In 2016-17 only 72 per cent of buses ran on time: three in 10. Three in 10 are late—or early, which is even worse. Instead of addressing the issue, the government has continued its normal practice of ignoring community expectation and has actually reduced the target for buses running on time to 75 per cent. That is the target. The target is 75 per cent. The target is to have one in four buses running early or late. That is the aspiration that we have in this government: that one in four buses will be early or one in four buses will be late.
This is a government with a broad view. Instead of improving the service to meet the target and standards of Canberrans, which, as you would hope, would be a 100 per cent target, you would hope they would actually be improving to get to that 100 per cent. Especially with the level of technology that is available these days with regard to dynamic timetabling and the information that they can get about route performance, they really should be able to ensure that the timetables genuinely reflect what is possible. But, as anyone who rides on ACTION would know, so often the timetable slips, especially in the latter part of journeys. (Second speaking period taken.)
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