School Bus Services

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:22): I rise with great reluctance and a bit of trepidation today to discuss an issue that needs urgent redress by this government. My previous interactions with the Minister for Transport have been very good. Indeed, there was an incident with a flooded roundabout which he dealt with within two weeks of my having raised it and, after constant badgering, he finally announced the Angaston railway land transfer to the Barossa Council for which, again, I am very grateful.

However, there is an issue that I need to bring to the attention of the house today which I know the minister is aware of and has been dealing with for over a month, but it seems we are actually further away from a resolution rather than closer. I speak of the fact that bus services that were previously provided by Faith Lutheran College in Tanunda have been taken over by the monopoly provider, LinkSA.

Since that takeover occurred, over the last couple of years, the number of complaints have ramped up and a number of those complaints are now, in my view, of an extremely serious nature. In highlighting these incidents, I would like the minister to urgently deal with this issue because the volume of complaints and the seriousness of a couple of the complaints warrant it. I will go through some of them.

There was an incident where a bus broke down and students were left on the side of a very busy road in the rural part of my electorate, waiting for over an hour to be picked up in a very unsafe and unacceptable environment and another where a fill-in driver was not provided with the proper updated list of the route and, hence, students were not picked up at all and were actually left on the side of the road.

There is a bus service that travels by the most indirect route possible, travelling 62 kilometres to pick up the students and bring them to Faith College when, at the same time, parents are being asked to pay $800 a month for the privilege. This indirect route has led to a lot of anxiety and new students starting at Faith are having real issues coping with and dealing with that. I have even had a letter in my local media from students of Faith on a certain Tanunda loop, who wrote an open letter, saying:

I am writing in concern for the students of the Nuriootpa (Tanunda Loop) bus route who have recently requested to be provided with a bus with improved features. This request and complaint is simply due to health risk issues.

The buses that were previously provided by Faith were of excellent and new condition and all with adequate air conditioning, but the new buses are not. We had a number of students who have had some reasonably serious health effects as a result of having to sit on these buses for extended periods of time without appropriate air conditioning.

I also want to talk about an incident where an air duct actually fell down and some students at the back of the bus decided to take it upon themselves to duct tape the duct back on. After constantly complaining to the driver, nothing happened. Link SA then went on to fix it; however, the next day it was unfixed again and this issue has gone on to occur.

There have been issues on the Lobethal run where the buses do not show up and when they do they are unmarked buses where previously they were Faith marked buses, and there is a reluctance by parents to put students on buses in those situations.

I have an incident here where a student came home extremely concerned and upset about the fact that the driver was cutting corners and was driving too fast on a single-lane road and the journey home was marred with a near miss at Gumeracha when the bus veered onto the wrong side of the road and almost collided with a car.

But the first of two important incidents that I want to raise is the fact that on the Saddleworth bus trip on the day of the Pinery fire the buses were not stopped from sending home and on the Saddleworth bus students travelled extremely close to the fire with a bus driver who was completely unaware of what was going on. I heard about an incident where a student was dropped off and the parting words from the bus driver were, 'Don't die in the fire,' which really escalated what was an extremely stressful day.

The final one I want to talk about is an incident where a bus driver agreed to take a student, who was dropped off at the college and had dropped her bag at the college, on to a third venue. I am not going to release more details about what happened afterwards, but, suffice to say, when a parent believes a bus service drops that child off at school and that child then ends up somewhere else meeting with other people in circumstances that I am not going to explain, it is unacceptable and the minister needs to deal with this issue urgently.