Page 928 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 March 2019
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students who live at ANU or who commute to its medical, physics and Asia-Pacific departments now face a half-hour walk to and from the city bus station. Maybe this government thinks it is not a big deal but it is.
Many of these students have chosen where they live based on the assumption of the on-campus bus service continuing. Beyond that, I remind this Assembly that not every university student is a perfectly able 20-year-old. Many students at the ANU live with disability or have mobility issues. Others have acute or chronic illness. This is not an easy half hour walk for them. This decision also unfairly targets international students and disadvantaged students who lack access to private transport.
This brings us to the serious issue of safety. A 2016 Australian Human Rights Commission report found that 3.5 per cent of respondents had been sexually assaulted on campus and more than one-third had been sexually harassed. Cutting the No 3 bus means that students will no longer have safe, reliable and affordable transport home at night. For a government that claims to be sensitive to issues facing women and LGBTIQA persons, this decision appears most uncaring and tone deaf.
This petition presents, in order of preference, three possible fixes for this problem. Any one of them will be better than telling the thousands of students who are left stranded by this decision to just deal with it. On behalf of these students and other concerned Canberra residents, I commend this petition with its 1,128 signatures to the Assembly.
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (10.35): I rise to thank the petitioners for both these important petitions. They both go to, I think, core issues of what this government is responsible for. The safety of citizens in schools, the safety of citizens catching buses should be central to what this government does. And the fact that we have a minister who is the Minister for Transport as well as the Minister for Higher Education and is unable to grasp the importance of this bus service tells us something about how they are approaching this issue.
But the key reason I am standing now is in response to something that the Deputy Chief Minister just said. In her speech about school violence and bullying the Deputy Chief Minister said, “I cannot imagine a world where this does not exist.” Hopeless and pessimistic statements like that do not bring any comfort whatsoever to the families of kids in our schools who have been traumatised.
Can you imagine if somebody in this place stood up and said, “I cannot imagine a world without domestic violence”? Can you imagine how that person would be howled down? Can you imagine if someone in the community stood up and said, “I can’t imagine a world without domestic violence”? How depressing would such a comment be!
Yet for some reason it is okay for the minister for education, the person who is meant to be putting the interests of children first, to come out with such a demoralising statement. So it is no wonder that so many families in the ACT feel absolutely hopeless about the situation that they have found themselves in. I urge this
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