House of Assembly Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2) 54 2 Parliament of South Australia House of Assembly published Grievance Debate Bus Services Bus Services The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN House of Assembly Lee The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee) (15:12): It is now abundantly clear that this is a period of crisis for public transport here in South Australia. This transport minister and his transport department have completely walked away from their most basic responsibility to provide public transport services to the community. Just think about it: trams have been privatised, trains are being privatised, road maintenance has been privatised, and the latest bus contract awarded by this minister under the Liberal's privatised model has massive cuts to bus services. Why? Because one of the first acts of this government was to impose $46 million worth of cuts to public transport services across metropolitan Adelaide. The electorate that I represent, the electorate of Lee in the western suburbs, is being particularly hard hit by these cuts. It seems, from the limited information that has been released by the government, that the following bus routes are being scrapped in the electorate of Lee: the route 112 services along Military Road from West Lakes Boulevard to Trimmer Parade; route 371 from West Lakes Centre Interchange, the clockwise loop; route 372, the anticlockwise loop of that service; route 376, West Lakes Centre Interchange to Delfin Island; and route N30, West Lakes Centre Interchange to the city. Forty-five bus stops in the electorate of Lee alone are being lost, judging by the route maps. These bus stops are being lost on Military Road, Grange Road, Trimmer Parade, Clark Terrace, Frederick Road, Island Drive, Corcoran Drive and Delfin Drive. The impacts of these cruel and unnecessary cuts are extraordinary. Someone who catches a bus from Delfin Island will now need to walk up to 1.1 kilometres to access a bus service on West Lakes Boulevard. A person living in Tennyson who catches the bus on Military Road will have to walk up to 1.8 kilometres to West Lakes Boulevard to catch a bus, or nearly 1.9 kilometres in the other direction to catch a bus on Fort Street, Grange. People living in Seaton, Woodville West and Findon who access West Lakes via either the 115 or 117 bus routes will now need to walk up to 1.7 kilometres to access a bus on Tapleys Hill Road or, alternatively, up to 1.7 kilometres to access a bus on West Lakes Boulevard. The West Lakes interchange loop—that 371/372 service that I mentioned before—which goes via Frederick Road, Clark Terrace, Trimmer Parade and Military Road, is being scrapped and the impacts will be felt by residents in Grange, Seaton, Hendon, Albert Park, Royal Park, West Lakes and Tennyson, constituents of the electorate of Lee as well as the electorate of Cheltenham. Five bus routes are to be cut, along with 45 bus stops, in the electorate of Lee alone. There are no bus services along the western part of Grange Road, dividing my electorate of Lee with the electorate of Colton, and that means there is now no bus service which provides people wanting to get to the Western Hospital with an approximate service. People will now have to walk nearly triple the distance if they want to get to Western Hospital on Cudmore Terrace in Henley Beach, a major service provider to residents of the western suburbs. It is abundantly clear that these cuts are being driven by nothing more than cost saving. They are being delivered by a minister and a bureaucracy who have completely ignored the needs of bus patrons in metropolitan Adelaide. The way to increase public transport patronage is to provide services, not take them away. The spurious argument that a new system of Go Zone buses, of collector buses and that local bus services will be able to cover metropolitan Adelaide is rubbish. There is not one local bus service proposed under the changes by this transport minister in the entirety of the western suburbs, from Outer Harbor to Marino—not one local bus service. These cuts are outrageous. They punish those people who rely on public transport. They punish those people who have no alternative transport options, and it shows that this government is completely out of touch with South Australians.