Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Friday last week I had the opportunity to visit the Gold Coast Mobility Office, which is coordinated by Judene Wallace. The Gold Coast Mobility Office plays a very important and crucial task in Gold Coast city, and that is the coordination of public transport between various private providers. It is funded under the HACC program, the Home and Community Care program, which is a program jointly funded by state and federal governments. The federal government contributes approximately 60 per cent of the funding and the state government approximately 40 per cent.

The team at the Gold Coast Mobility Office do an outstanding job of ensuring that the elderly population of the Gold Coast have access to public transport. This is primarily delivered through a very inventive yet perhaps almost commonsense approach to the delivery of this kind of public transport service. Primarily it is delivered by Judene Wallace and the team through the coordination of timetables by private operators. There are a number of respite care providers as well as aged care facilities, each of which has private capacity in buses which they provide for the residents. The problem in the past has been that many of these private operators do not use this bus capacity, for example, for many hours of the day. So the Gold Coast Mobility Office simply coordinates the various timetables of the respite care centres as well as of the aged care facilities to provide public transport to elderly residents to help them get to hospitals, shops and other kinds of appointments, such as with doctors. I commend the service to the House. (Time expired)