Page 108 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 11 February 2020
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the minister claim on a number of occasions that the Canberra Liberals have plans to privatise our bus network. This is despite the fact that I have categorically ruled that out in this place and in the media on numerous occasions. Once again, for Minister Steel, let me be quite clear. A Canberra Liberal government will not privatise bus services.
The minister also claimed today that we have apparently announced that we will be cutting 22 local bus services. I have no idea where or when he got this information, because we have absolutely made no such commitment. We have continued to advocate for more bus services. I am not really sure whether I should be flattered that I feature so prominently in Minister Steel’s imagination or if he should be looking to get better advice.
Instead of pointing the finger at the Canberra Liberals, the minister needs a mirror. It is his government which has privatised light rail. It is his government which has cut school bus services. It is his government which has cut weekend and commuter services. And it is his government which has cut 752 bus stops across Canberra.
We have continued to advocate for more regular and reliable services. The Canberra Liberals have lodged petition after petition. We continue to listen to and advocate for the hundreds of Canberrans who have contacted us because of services that have been cut by this government.
We continue to be the only party in this place which is committed to getting Canberra’s school children to and from school safely with dedicated school bus services. We have today already seen dirty media election tactics commencing, and it is disappointing that, rather than taking responsibility and owning up to the failures of his bus network and apologising to the thousands of Canberrans that have been impacted, we are today seeing the minister succumbing to such behaviour.
Sophia Hamblin Wang—tribute
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra) (5.32): I want to kick off the year with some inspiration. It is in the form not of a quote, an event or a parable but of a person. It is Sophia Hamblin Wang, whom I first mentioned in this place back in 2018. Back then, Sophia had just accepted the award for resource innovator of the year at the Raw Materials Summit in Berlin. Mineral Carbonation International, of which Sophia is the chief operating officer, is an Australian-led start-up which is developing technology which not only captures CO2 from emitters and by sucking it from the atmosphere but also then utilises that CO2, turning it from a waste product into something useful like cement, pavers and plasterboards. That is right: emitters can be making money out of their carbon dioxide. I think we can see why they won.
Since then, Sophia has continued to be a leading voice on the national and international stages. I want to take a moment to draw some attention to just a very small selection of her recent achievements, where she has represented not only herself and her company but also Canberra and Australia. The first is that Sophia recently attended the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invited as one of 50 “global shapers”, who are people aged between 20 and 30 who have been
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