Page 2925 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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employment. Given the rules, that will always be on weekdays. I put this as a possible area where change may need to be made.
Of course, all of these questions about the reason for these issues is actually irrelevant if you are waiting in the cold for a bus that has been cancelled. You do not even know that it has been cancelled; you just hope that it is running late. You do not care about the complexities of the enterprise agreement or whether the drivers are volunteering or not. You just want your bus to turn up so that you can get out of the cold. The travelling public, the public of Canberra, just want the weekend bus problem to be fixed.
My amendment to Miss Burch’s motion is intended to escalate awareness of this problem within government, to give it the priority that passengers want it to have. It calls for an urgent action plan to get this problem fixed and to reduce the inconvenience for passengers while we are waiting for it to be fixed.
I will step through what the action plan needs to cover. Firstly, the government needs to find ways of working out what services are cancelled earlier. I understand—and Minister Steel went through this in his speech—that this is currently worked out only on a Saturday morning, as drivers are still able to pick up casual and overtime shifts until the last minute. I can see his dilemma regarding having more buses and more reliability, but it is really not good enough. I think that the bus drivers could work it out earlier.
Miss Burch’s motion pushed for this to be made available on the preceding Wednesday, which would be an excellent idea. At the very minimum, I cannot see why people could not be told on Friday night what bus services will be running or not running. Surely, that would not reduce the number of drivers volunteering.
Secondly, a lot more effort must be put into letting people know what services have been cancelled. At present, as I mentioned earlier, the passenger has to try to work it out. That is not good enough. The government has staff at interchanges, even over the weekends. These staff could put up a list of cancelled services at each platform. They could also make regular announcements during the day. It should not be up to passengers to look at the signs and try to work out, “Oh, it’s not there. It’s definitely not there. It’s not just that it’s going to be late.” The list of cancellations does not appear to be posted on any website or social media, and this should be fixed.
These are basic steps that should already be happening 3½ months in. It is clear that a mindset change is needed. It is just not good enough for it to be the passengers’ responsibility to find out what has been cancelled. It is actually Transport Canberra’s responsibility to tell as many people as possible, and to reduce the number of cancellations as much as possible.
To do that, the third thing that I would suggest is that the government needs to look at incentives that they can quickly get into place to get more drivers to volunteer, until they have done their additional recruitment. Obviously, I am not a manager there, so I am only making some suggestions; I do not really know. Some things that come to mind are giving drivers who volunteer for a certain number of weekend overtime
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