PUBLIC TRANSPORT FARE EVASION

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg) (15:27): Yesterday, I felt some sympathy for the Minister for Transport Services in her having to swallow the bitter pill on behalf of the government and debate a bill to fix up a monumental stuff-up in the Department of Transport. That sympathy, I have to say, evaporated when I picked up the paper, The Advertiser, this morning to see that the minister had announced that she was going to conduct a major crackdown on the 300,000 people who have been disclosed in the previous 12 months as having failed to pay their fare on public transport at the cost of some $3 million a year to the bottom line, and it was going to be executed by her.

This crackdown was going to be the response to this apparent understanding that this had occurred and that there had been a major problem, and that she was going to initiate sufficient measures to make sure this did not happen again. One of them was to corral all of the people on an on-the-spot checking basis as they go off the bus, including all of the law-abiding citizens who paid their ticket, so they could do a check to find these offending people who either cannot or will not or can but do not pay their fares when they get onto our public transport.

Let's be clear about this: that in itself would not have been a bad thing except for two things. One is that this government had done nothing about this issue of fare evasion until the chronic situation that we now have with public transport in the state had been publicly disclosed over the last few months. One is a massive reduction in patronage. Millions fewer passengers are travelling on public transport since this minister has taken over the responsibility of this portfolio. There has been a massive lack of confidence demonstrated by people, with their feet, in not using public transport, an important service in the state for lots of reasons which are well known to other members.

The mass exodus of patronage was bad enough to the bottom line. Jack Snelling must have been turning in his sleep and having nightmares about what was happening over in the transport department, with this massive loss, when they are putting in billions of dollars, some of which they have cancelled (about $1 billion worth in the last budget).

A lot of taxpayers' money is going into public transport to meet the need of what is less than 10 per cent of the population who use it. Nevertheless it is an important public service. In the last few years particularly, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the development of public transport to encourage more people to use it, and what do we find? We have a lot fewer people using the service under this transport minister, and those who are still travelling on the smelly, late, unclean, unlit, lack of security public transport services have repeatedly complained about the service under her watch. We find, in fact, that fewer people are using it, and we have fewer of them paying. What does the minister do? Her answer is to go to The Advertiser with the story today to say, 'I am going to have a crackdown on this. We are going to have Operation Lightning,' or however she described it in question time today. Lightning! Operation light bulb at this point.

The second aspect I confirmed today is that it was not only known to the department and the minister, back on 11 May, that the minister sold a story to The Advertiser telling them that she was having a crackdown when it was disclosed that the public transport fare evasion was clearly a problem. In fact, she trotted out this story that she had trebled the expiation notices that were going to be issued from something like 84 up to 284. Big deal! We have 300,000 people who are not paying their fare on our public transport, and the minister's action was that she would issue more expiation notices.

According to this article, apparently 12 people to date have been identified as repeat offenders to be considered for exclusion orders. Where has this minister been! Twelve out of 300,000 people who are refusing to pay on buses. Some of them apparently cannot; they cannot even operate the machines, they are not working, whatever. Some of them do not, because we will always have the scammers. But most of them can clearly pay but they have learnt under this government, under this level of mismanagement, that they can get on a bus, tram or a train—

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): The member's time has expired.

Ms CHAPMAN: —and they do not have to pay; it is optional.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Hon. M.J. Wright): Thank you.