Grievance Debate

Bus Services

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (15:12): Over the course of the weekend an incredibly significant announcement was made by the Marshall Liberal government. They announced a comprehensive, wideranging set of sweeping changes to our public transport network, principally to our bus services, that constitute the single biggest cut to public transport in the history of South Australia.

It has taken a number of days for the breadth and depth of these cuts to start to disseminate amongst the community in South Australia but, as South Australians grow more familiar with exactly what these changes mean to them, I think we are going to increasingly hear just how concerned those affected people are. Already, over the course of the last 48 hours, the opposition has been inundated with examples of real people who have done absolutely nothing wrong in recent times. They have been good, loyal citizens of the state and have now found out that a fundamental service upon which they depend has been taken away from them.

Yesterday morning, I went out to the north-eastern suburbs and spoke to about 10 different individuals who each of their own volition conveyed to me a story about what this cut would mean to their daily lives. I was there with the member for Wright, and I found myself growing increasingly agitated at the news and the stories that these people were conveying.

Take Christine, the mother of two amazing young women who are both studying in their own right. One is studying chemical engineering—I think her name is Josephine—and the other young woman, Elsa, is studying physiotherapy at university and working part-time at the Lyell McEwin Hospital. Christine was explaining to me how they recently moved to South Australia and chose to buy in the location they currently live, close to the M44 service, so their daughters could get to and from university and to and from their places of work. Now that service is being taken away, only months after they decided to purchase land in that location for that explicit reason.

The practical consequence of that for Christine's daughters is that Elsa is now going to be faced with the prospect of walking an additional 30 minutes in the morning to be able to catch the alternate service that she requires to get to the Lyell McEwin for work. She will be walking in the depths of night along a creek bed that is unlit in the dark of the morning and in the dark of the night to be able to service our state at the Lyell McEwin. Christine's other daughter is faced with the prospect of, after doing a 10 to 12-hour day at university as a chemical engineering student, also having to extend her travel time for the privilege of going to university—an absurd situation.

I met Paul, a cancer sufferer, who relies on having to go to the RAH on a frequent basis in order to get his treatment. He needs that public transport service to be able to get to and from the RAH. He does not have regular access to a car—again service taken away. I met other individuals, including Denise, whose husband, Peter, has to get to and from the city to get to the dental hospital. Again they are having that service taken away. I met Steve, whose son is autistic and requires public transport to get to and from his daily routine, a routine that he depends upon for the sake of familiarity and also to be able to engage positively in society and the economy, and he has just had his service taken away, and that was all that one bus stop—one bus stop.

Now we hear that this is being replicated 500 times across metropolitan Adelaide—at least. The overall majority of South Australians will go to bed tonight not even knowing whether or not their own bus stop still exists because this government will not be transparent about exactly what services and what stops are being taken away. Let me make it perfectly clear: this is just the beginning. We are going to fight these bus cuts all the way because there are thousands of stories, like those I have just told, of people who depend on us to do exactly that.

We will not allow the voiceless to go unheard, we will not allow the most vulnerable in our community to miss out on a service that is elementary to state government and we certainly will not allow that to happen in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in the state's history, when 40,000 people lose their job in one month and 100,000 are underemployed. Now is the time to be investing in public services, not cutting them, not privatising, and that is why we will fight this every step of the way.