Page 3129 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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It is possible that the decision had not been made at that point in time, but even if that decision had not been made on Wednesday, if it was going to be announced on Friday morning, I have to imagine, as Miss Burch did, that this at least had been contemplated beforehand. Minister Steel did not wake up on Friday at 5 am and say, “Oh, look, I have a solution. Let us just cut them.” I look forward to Minister Steel explaining why there was no mention whatsoever of what it turned out he intended to do. It was disappointing and incredibly disrespectful to the Assembly. But more than that, it is disrespectful to the community of Canberra, particularly the travelling public but even the public who are not travelling.
I note that part (b) of the motion is not correct. Weekend service reliability rates are better than 80 per cent; they are apparently 89 per cent.
Part (c) of the motion is an interesting one. It says:
… the repeated failures of the Minister for Transport and City Services to deliver more frequent and reliable weekend services, as promised under Network19 …
For all the problems of the new weekend service, it has delivered more frequent services. That is a matter of fact. It is also, unfortunately, a matter of fact that it has delivered less reliable weekend services. I gave (c) half marks on that one.
Opposition members interjecting—
MS LE COUTEUR: I take this one quite seriously, because, to put it mildly, as would be clear from my statements, I am not pleased with what is going on. It is disrespectful. I thought about the words in (2), about the censure of the Minister for Transport and City Services for his failure. I thought that it would be really somewhat unfair to do this. Minister Steel has been the minister for about six weeks. I assume he had nothing to do with setting up the weekend network. I assume that whatever faults there were with it—and as Miss Burch has repeated a few times, it is likely that the government did receive advice from the TWU that it would not work—Minister Steel was not the minister who received this information. If there was someone to be censured, it would presumably be the previous transport minister.
Mr Parton: Bit hard.
MS LE COUTEUR: Yes. As Mr Parton has noted, that is a bit hard. I think that rather than blaming Minister Steel for problems which eventuated before his time, and recognising that things take time to do, he possibly needs a bit longer to fix all of those. I agree—I am not happy to agree, but I do agree—that there are major problems with the weekend bus network, but the grounds of the censure are not fair.
I thought a bit more about what has led to these problems. Miss Burch probably does not realise how far back the “ongoing workforce planning issues” go. You might be interested to know that the decision to scrap penalty rates was made in 1995 by Tony De Domenico, who I think went to the same high school as me, or some of his relatives did. He was the Liberal minister for urban services. He said that the
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