Page 3137 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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At the point of agreeing to the action plan on Wednesday, the government had not finalised what our plan for weekend adjustments would look like. I continued to get advice from Transport Canberra after the motion was debated last week to ensure that the announcement of adjusting weekend services was a sound solution for Canberrans, to provide an interim solution to weekend bus reliability. As the information became available, I was able to confidently announce that adjustments could be made to the bus network, which I did on Friday, and made this information available to the public as soon as I could.
While we recruit and train more bus drivers, adjusting the frequency of weekend buses is a responsible interim measure to give certainly to the community. I have been up-front about that with the public, as soon as possible. It is not being disrespectful; it is being honest to the public about where we were up to at a certain point in time in relation to the actions that we were wanting to take. I realise that this would have come as a surprise to members of the Assembly about one of the actions that we were taking. It is not the only action that we are taking. We will continue to work on a range of actions under our plan, consistent with the Assembly motion moved last week.
More people are using public transport, and public transport is now more frequent for most Canberrans. A significant increase in services has been offered on weekends as part of the new network. I have acknowledged the issues being faced with the reliability of these extra services, but have also outlined the steps our government is taking to improve weekend service reliability. I look forward to providing updates on our plans for weekend services in the future and releasing the action plan outlining the next steps forward in the weeks ahead. We will continue to work on a range of other actions to improve reliability, which is what I said last week and what I will continue to say as that work continues. We will not be ruling out options; we will be looking at all options that are available.
I thank Ms Le Couteur for her amendment to the motion and certainly support those extra suggestions in relation to the enterprise agreement. Of course we continue to meet with the Transport Workers Union on these issues on a regular basis, and I am very happy to look at demand response to services, which is something Transport Canberra has been thinking about. (Time expired.)
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (11.03): What we have heard today is the mumbo jumbo that you would expect from a very tired government. All of this talk today that they are firing on all cylinders does not mean much to the person who is waiting at a bus stop in Canberra on a Saturday morning—that is, of course, if they are at one of the bus stops that has not been ripped out by this government. Hundreds and hundreds of bus stops have been ripped out. Despite the fact that they have ripped out more than 500 bus stops in Canberra, they are still incapable of servicing the ones that are left. It goes to the gross incompetence of those opposite.
Unfortunately, we see here yet another example of these ministers pushing public servants in front of a bus—perhaps a non-existent bus, but they push them all the same. I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr Steel’s department would have been
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