Page 478 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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This is a government that has known about these issues for 18 months. This is a minister who has been complicit in this failure since he became the minister last year. If the past nine months are any indication of what we can expect until polling day, Canberrans will continue to have a minister for transport who is so arrogantly out of touch that he cannot bring himself to admit failure and to apologise for not listening, let alone apologise for the mistakes that he has made.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.53): The Greens will not be supporting Miss Burch’s motion. I am sorry to disappoint you all, but I am someone who is a bit of a details person which, I agree, is a disadvantage in my current line of work. I really would like factual accuracy. I know that many voters seem to believe that politicians routinely lie. I do not. I try to be as accurate as possible and I am afraid that Miss Burch’s motion, sadly, is not really factually, totally accurate.
As I said last time we debated network 19, it has been a case of people who win out, people who miss out and a botched rollout. But one fact that cannot be totally ignored, a fairly crucial fact, is that patronage is substantially higher, as of course is the number of services. But we have to remember this: more people actually are taking buses and light rail. The last data I have, for the three months from 1 July to 30 September 2019, showed that overall patronage was up by six per cent compared to the same time in 2018. Whatever you say about network 19, it really cannot be described as an overall transport disaster. Patronage has gone up in total.
Furthermore, some parts of Canberra are particularly benefitting from network 19, and this includes, in my electorate, Weston Creek and the Molonglo Valley. It is really hard for me to say, as a local member for Weston Creek and the Molonglo Valley, that network 19 is an unmitigated transport disaster when patronage from the former is up by 12 per cent and the latter by 25 per cent.
However, it is important to recognise that despite the overall higher patronage there are some places that have not done nearly as well. There are some places where things have not changed and there are some people for whom the network has gone backwards. It is true, as Miss Burch has highlighted, that network 19 has caused significant problems for some people and some parts of Canberra. I certainly acknowledge and agree with this and have made numerous representations on this matter.
Apart from anything else, some of the parts of Canberra that have not done well out of this change have been the other half of my electorate, that is, Woden Valley. Woden Valley journey starts, as measured by our MyWay cards, were down five per cent in the three months from July to September 2019 compared to 2018. And that is clearly a problem that needs fixing. From my point of view, the other smaller part of my electorate, Tuggeranong, also suffered a decrease in patronage, and I am pleased to see that there will be some tweaks of that in—I am not quite sure what we are calling the new network—network 19.
In many places there are also individual people who have been disadvantaged by the changes. Getting rid of the Xpresso services has been an issue in Tuggeranong in
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