Page 477 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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saw this with the re-announcement last week of a ticketing system which was promised three years ago and is yet to be delivered. It will not be delivered for another few years.
What has not crept into his playbook is any form of humility, self-awareness or sense of remorse. Disrespect and disdain for Canberrans seem to be the common theme running through Mr Barr’s government. They are the only things they have consistently shown over the past four years.
Mr Steel has shown complete disdain for the real and genuine concerns of Canberrans. Nowhere can this disdain be more clearly seen than in his treatment of south-side Canberrans. These concerns have been well documented. We heard about school students from Gowrie being stranded in 2018, stressed and confused following the chaos and cuts to school services. We have heard about hardworking weekend workers, some of whom have been struggling to hold down a job or have had to change jobs because of service cuts.
We have also seen the emotional toll that this has taken on the elderly in our community. I refer to a Canberra Times article titled “‘We’re the forgotten people of the south’: bus changes opposition heats up”, in which a Wanniassa resident stated, “They’ve taken our bus routes without any consultation and without any thought to the people who are living in this area.” What has Mr Steel’s response been? He continues to refuse to acknowledge these failings and he refuses to apologise. Mr Steel’s answer, was:
… I live on the south side, in Kambah. I realise that I live there every day when I wake up and go to work.”
There was no acknowledgement, no reasoning and no apology for the chaos and the cuts that he and his government have caused. There was no apology for their absolute continuous refusal to listen.
This is what we have come to expect from a minister who has, since day one, overpromised and underdelivered. We only need to look to his commitment to hiring bus drivers to see this. The minister spent the better part of last August and September doing media interviews and speaking about the driver hiring blitz which he had undertaken in order to staff the services that he had promised. Mr Steel was proud to speak of that in this place, about his commitment to more public transport throughout the city, despite only embarking on this hiring blitz after news broke that his government had known about these chronic staff shortages for years.
We have had two weekend network timetables, hundreds of weekend service cuts, 136 tweaks to the regular network and 10,000 signatories from petitions calling on the government to do better. But over the same time, we have still had zero apologies from the minister. “I got it wrong and we are sorry.” Why is that so difficult? It might not seem like much, but to the hundreds of Canberrans who feel as if their concerns have continuously fallen on deaf ears, this would mean an awful lot.
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