Page 2924 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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glad to hear the minister say that NXTBUS will be improved, because NXTBUS is actually a seven-day-a-week problem. It does not reliably tell you where a bus actually is. That was the whole idea of the exercise. Personally, I find it very frustrating, so I thank Minister Steel for that.
These problems are a real shame, because network 19 is, in general, an improvement over the previous network. It runs for much longer hours, particularly on Sundays, when services on most routes used to finish just after 6 pm. It has seven-days-a-week routes, which means passengers do not have to know about two different networks, and passengers are not relegated to a second-class network on weekends. It has more routes at half-hourly or better services than the previous network.
As I mentioned earlier, despite all of its problems with cancellations, network 19 is proving very popular at weekends. Patronage is up by over 30 per cent. As I was saying, average Saturday journeys were up from 12,768 in June 2018 to 16,985 in June 2019, an increase of a third. Average Sunday journeys were also up by almost 40 per cent. To increase public transport use by 40 per cent is huge. This is a significant achievement, and we should be celebrating it. The way that we are celebrating it right now is by saying that this is so good that we want to keep it going. We want to keep it as a good, reliable service, and the way to keep that 40 per cent improvement is to solve the cancellation problem.
I am worried about the cancellation problem because people will try a few times then, if the bus is not there, they will not try in a month’s time when maybe the problem has been solved. They will say, “No, it doesn’t work”. They will stay at home or they will get in their car. It would be a real shame, given that we have started to have what is clearly a better system than before, if we did not fix it up, fix the 10 per cent-plus cancellation rate and get the buses on the road reliably. I am confident that we can do it.
What is causing the cancellations? It would seem that the problem lies with how the government runs Transport Canberra buses, because Capital Metro is not having the same problems. The minister has told us that it is due to a lack of bus drivers. He has argued that all that the government needs to do is hire more casual drivers. He may well be right. I was very pleased to hear in question time that another 10 drivers are about to start. Of course, it does beg the question as to why we are doing it now rather than three months ago. We should have been able to work this out before.
Be that as it may, we cannot undo the past. I am worried that there may in fact be a bigger can of worms underlying this, that is, the enterprise bargaining agreement. I understand that it has a number of features that make it hard to get drivers to work on weekends. I asked a question without notice on this during the last sitting period.
The features include full-time and permanent part-time drivers only being rostered for weekday shifts. That means that on weekends there is a combination of permanent drivers volunteering for overtime and casuals being needed to cover weekends. Penalty rates and overtime rates were scrapped years ago by being rolled into the standard hourly rate, removing an incentive to do weekend and overtime work. Casuals who do the same shift for 12 months have to be offered permanent
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