Page 3126 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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Now the litany of failures with the new bus network is compounded even further by the minister walking away from one of his government’s core promises: the promise of 70 per cent more weekend services. Rather than actually taking the time to work through this issue, to fast-track driver recruitment and to offer drivers incentives for working weekends, the minister has decided that it is all just too hard and has walked away from this commitment. Rather than addressing the reliability issues I raised last week and actually finding a way to inform Canberrans about service cancellation, the minister has just decided to slash and burn the weekend timetable.
As if that was not bad enough, we now know that this government was never in a position to fulfil this commitment in the first place. We now know that the Transport Workers Union warned the government years ago of these problems. We now know that this government, under the former transport minister, rolled out a weekend bus network that it always knew it would not be able to deliver. They gave Canberrans promises of 70 per cent more weekend services when they knew that they had far too few drivers—perhaps even up to 200 too few drivers—to ever be able to deliver this weekend network.
Instead of addressing these issues, instead of hiring enough drivers, offering incentives or moving towards a seven-day rostering system, they pig-headedly pushed on with promises of and commitments to a timetable they knew they could not deliver. They encouraged Canberrans to flock to the new weekend network, knowing that these services might not arrive. In doing so, they deliberately left Canberrans stranded at bus stops, waiting hours for buses that would never show up.
While the minister will try to shirk responsibility and claim that he was not responsible for the rollout, here in a weekend bus timetable we have the perfect metaphor for a flailing, tired and out-of-touch government, a government that arrogantly and stubbornly pursues plans despite advice to the contrary, a government that demonstrates such complete disregard and disrespect for Canberrans, a government that will no longer even listen to their union mates. If they are not listening to the union anymore, who on earth is left that they will listen to?
In announcing that he was cutting weekend services and reneging on such a key promise, the minister had a clear choice. He could have apologised to Canberrans; he could have admitted failure and accepted that this problem was far too big for him to overcome. He could have even blamed his predecessor and said that he was fixing problems that she had created, or thrown her under the bus, so to speak.
Instead, the minister decided to pull out every trick in the book, every attempt at political spin doctoring. The minister actually thought he could pull the wool over Canberrans’ eyes. “More reliable weekend bus services”, his media release proclaimed. “More reliable weekend bus services”, we saw plastered across the top of the Transport Canberra website. You have not for a second fooled Canberrans—cancelling bus services and adding a two-hour wait for suburban services, yet describing them as more reliable. As one constituent aptly put on social media, “There is no more reliable bus service than one that does not exist.”
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