Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Growing up in Altona and spending my life in Melbourne's western suburbs, I have seen a lot of change in the area over my time. One of the things that has happened is a huge population increase with wave after wave of new housing and new communities spreading west out to Werribee and beyond. I understand the pull to live in Melbourne's west; it is a fantastic spot. Its communities are diverse, vibrant and close to various industries and employers, and it is accessible to the bay and the city. But one thing the west doesn't have is fast, efficient, and reliable public transport.

If you are a worker who relies on taking the train from Altona to get into work in the city, you will often find the trains are overcrowded and do no run often enough. The rail service through Altona is the most unreliable in Melbourne and the one that commuters are most unhappy about. My mother and sister still live in Altona, and I used to travel to school by train from there over 30 years ago. There were more trains from Altona then than now.

I follow the Altona Loop users Facebook group. Virtually every day a train is recorded by one of the group members as having been cancelled, and regular delays are tallied for the record. These are a daily record of the disruptions caused and a the loss of productivity of our city's workers. Given they only have a train every 22 minutes even in peak hour, when a train is cancelled, it is a big deal. It is no wonder that the patronage of the Altona line dropped by 30 per cent between 2008 and 2012 when passenger numbers on the rest of the Melbourne network soared.

A bit further out from Melbourne is the suburb of Point Cook. If you live there and perhaps you need to get the kids to school a couple of stations up the line, you will encounter daily traffic jams in your local streets just trying to get to your nearest train station. Poor bus connections are leaving communities like this stranded without a choice. Cars choke the streets despite poll after poll showing that the people of Melbourne want better public transport, not new toll roads.

Further out again is Caroline Springs. If you live in Caroline Springs, you have not got a train station despite being on the Ballarat train line. Housing development in Caroline Springs began 15 years ago, and there are now over 20,000 who live there. Construction of their station is meant to start next year, but even then they will only have a diesel country service running hourly most of the day. And it is going to be a rail service stricken with a shortfall in funding, which was revealed in the media today as resulting in 'unplanned service disruptions, higher rates of system failures, speed restrictions', and 'deteriorating network performance that will not support long-term patronage growth'.

Things only get worse as you head out into regional Victoria. Vast areas of Victoria have such pathetic public transport it just does not provide a usable service for people. If you live in one of the suburbs of, say, Bendigo or Shepparton, you might have a bus service to get you to work, but quite likely it only goes once a hour—if that. And, if you live in Shepparton, you have just five trains a day connecting you with Melbourne, the last one leaving Shepp at 4 pm. And the way they've 'fixed' the train service on the Albury line is to shift the goal posts: they have added 15 minutes to the journey time to take account of slow, unreliable service.

Public transport in Melbourne and across Victoria and Australia's major urban settlements can be improved immediately. More trains, trams and buses can be added to the existing network; upgrading the antiquated train signal system can deliver more frequent and reliable train services for commuters. Yet, despite the degraded state of our train network and the lack of buses, the Victorian government and the federal government are proposing to spend billions of dollars and suck up the vast majority of the transport budget on the disastrous East West Link tollway. Three billion dollars has been committed by the Abbott government without sharing a business case or the details of a cost-benefit analysis with us; and, in an astoundingly blinkered move, the federal government is refusing to fund any public transport infrastructure. Taken alone, this ideologically driven policy is backwards in the extreme. But, when you consider it in the context of the Abbott government's brutal budget, it represents another hit to our community's most disadvantaged.

There are important links between the provision of public infrastructure and other factors affecting people's lives and household budgets. At a recent public hearing in Melbourne I sat with fellow senators who are part of the select committee inquiring into the impact of the Abbott government's budget. We heard from expert witnesses and advocates at that day's hearing that had a particular focus on the federal transport budget. Again let us remind ourselves of the most glaring thing in the transport budget—that we have got a government that refuses to put a cent towards public transport projects in Australia.

What the Prime Minister cannot ignore is that Victorians, and indeed Australians living in all our traffic choked cities, want better public transport. Poll after poll shows this. Victorians do not want our transport budget funnelled into more polluting new toll roads at the expense of trains and buses or indeed at the expense of funding local councils, which maintain local roads and bridges. One of the experts we heard from at the hearing was Professor Jago Dodson from RMIT University in Melbourne. His key area of research interest is urban policy. Professor Dodson homed in on the interplay between planning, socioeconomic factors and access to infrastructure. He said:

… rapid suburban expansion which stressed the capacities of local and state governments to deliver services … local governments struggle to deliver good quality services in fringe areas. State governments struggle to deliver education, health, public transport and similar kinds of public services in these expanding areas of our cities. It is a problem that we have not really resolved.

We are not seeing any steps being taken by this government towards resolving these ongoing problems. All the while our urban communities and those on the urban fringe remain stranded without adequate public transport. What does the Prime Minister, who says he will only fund roads, think this means for a family's primary carer spending their days at home with the kids who just needs to get the shopping done on a given weekday and whose partner has been forced by a lack of public transport to take their only car to the workplace? In most parts of Melbourne's outer suburbs, where the bus service is erratic at best, this parent is stranded, under further pressure to manage the household.

In the areas that are most lacking public transport, many people are living with other compounding factors, leading to significant social disadvantage. The government's budget is exacerbating these factors in several ways. Professor Dodson's evidence at the public hearing noted:

… we have suburban environments which … in terms of systematic delivery of public services to these areas, the approach has been very ad hoc and haphazard … such areas are therefore exposed in compounding ways to household budget pressures. In the current budget context, the increasing of health costs, the increasing of fuel costs, and the increasing of education expenses, particularly for tertiary education, are likely to have multiple effects, particularly in the suburban areas, which is where the households who are relatively less socioeconomically resilient are located.

I have great concern about these multiple effects of the budget cuts when combined with the government's complete lack of regard for the public transport infrastructure so desperately needed by Australian communities. Across urban and regional Australia the story is the same. We know what needs to happen—we need to stop spending money on exorbitantly expensive tollways that will not solve our congestion problems and instead invest in public transport and other community infrastructure. We can afford it. It is a matter of choice as to where the infrastructure budget is spent. The Greens are committed to spending our money wisely on public transport projects that will really make a difference in people's lives, rather than on massive tollway projects that will only serve to line the pockets of the road lobby, property developer and financier mates of the government.