Legislative Council: Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Contents

Parliamentary Committees

Select Committee on Public and Active Transport

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. R.A. Simms:

That the report of the select committee be noted.

(Continued from 8 February 2023.)

The Hon. B.R. HOOD (23:07): I rise this evening to comment on the report of the Select Committee on Public and Active Transport as it relates to my portfolios of infrastructure and transport and regional roads. I commend all committee members for their work that went into this report, and I particularly commend the Chair, the Hon. Robert Simms.

I want to echo and reiterate the concerns of the Hon. Robert Simms about the government's lack of response to this report, which was laid on the table in this place more than 18 months ago. After consulting with over 100 stakeholders and hearing evidence from 50 witnesses, the committee provided 13 recommendations, covering public transport services, rail, freight and active transport.

I commend the committee for putting a strong regional lens on these issues. While it would have been nice for the committee to venture out into the regions, it was of course in the midst of COVID. That is when they were gathering evidence, so we can certainly understand the limitation that was up against the committee.

I was pleased to see that the City of Mount Gambier provided a submission in which they highlighted the enormous disparity in bus service funding between metropolitan and regional South Australia. It is certainly something that I have been speaking about since coming to this place and, indeed, since before that when I was the Deputy Mayor of the City of Mount Gambier.

As the council's submission highlighted, while metro funding in South Australia was to the tune of some $234 per capita, regional areas attracted a mere $11 per capita. That has corrected itself somewhat over the last 18 months since this report has come to us, but regional areas are still hovering around about the $35 mark per capita, as opposed to over $240 in the metro areas. That is a whopping 95 per cent disparity between city and country South Australia.

Pleasingly, the significance of this was recognised by the committee and it is incorporated front and centre in recommendation 1a, which calls on the state government to review its policies and processes to ensure improvements across the public transport system and to increase efficiencies of buses, both metropolitan and regional SA services.

In the submissions of both the City of Mount Gambier and the Port Augusta, Roxby Downs and Woomera Health Advisory Council, they rightly note that improved public transport services are not an end in themselves. Importantly, better public transport will have significant, positive flow-on effects as a contributor to the social capital within a community and will benefit the physical and mental health of those living in our regions. Improved services will also reduce social isolation, provide increasing employment opportunities, encourage active citizenship, enhance volunteering opportunities and offer many other knock-on benefits.

The committee heard evidence about the transport disadvantages across regional South Australia and highlighted Hammond as an infrequent and expensive service, with a one-day fare from Murray Bridge to Mount Barker costing over $15. In comparison, I note that a one-way trip from Mount Gambier to Mount Barker will set you back more than $88, although if you want to travel to Melbourne from Mount Gambier it will cost you $10. You just have to get to Warrnambool and then you are straight through to Melbourne for 10 bucks.

We do not only need improved services between regions in Adelaide but we are also very much lacking in services within our regional centres, and there is no better example than our state's second biggest city. In Mount Gambier there has been some tinkering around the edges of our public bus contract, but it is still considered woefully inadequate by the local council and the community.

I note that I am still waiting on answers to questions submitted on notice six weeks ago regarding when the long-awaited review into regional public transport services will commence. What is the cause of the delay and when will the minister consider an on-demand public transport service in Mount Gambier, following the success of the Mount Barker Keoride trial?

The Hon. R.A. Simms: Very good question. When will we get a response?

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Simms, interjections are out of order.

The Hon. B.R. HOOD: While they languish on the Notice Paper, the opposition has wasted no time in announcing our own on-demand bus service in Mount Gambier, should we be elected in 2026.

Remarkably, the Keoride on-demand service, which was initiated by the Marshall Liberal government, achieved a 97 per cent customer satisfaction rate in the Adelaide Hills and encouraged more than 50 per cent of customers to no longer use their cars for trips covered by the service area. This latter finding goes on to one of the recommendations of the select committee, which happens to be the only one that I perhaps do not necessarily fully agree with. Recommendation 10 suggests that the Department for Infrastructure and Transport should review its internal policies and procedures to:

(a) remove messaging that promotes cars over other modes of travel; and

(b) actively promote alternatives to car travel to improve community health, wellbeing and reduce carbon emissions.

I understand where the committee is coming from in this recommendation. It sounds very fine in principle if you live in a metro area but, as I highlighted earlier, it is not practical or economical for regional people like me to jump on a bus and get to and from Adelaide.

A much better approach to incentivising greater public transport patronage is to have a service that is fit for purpose and meets the needs and expectations of the community. I read with interest in the select committee report the evidence heard about the impact of low or zero fares, especially in the context of 50ยข fares implemented recently in Queensland. It is something that I am investigating, something I am very interested in seeing what we might be able to do here in South Australia, but the committee heard that a better approach to increasing patronage is not through introducing lower fares but rather increasing the frequency of service.

Similarly, the Productivity Commission found that zero or low fares could actually divert an important source of funds away from the provision of services to potentially subsidising high income earners. Elsewhere in the report I read with interest about support for the reactivation of regional rail and extending the passenger rail network in the north and the south. That is something I will certainly be investigating into the future. These are all very worthy and much-needed recommendations as Greater Adelaide continues to grow, and from a road safety perspective it would be very much welcomed across city and country.

Sensible recommendations were also made in the final report relating to freight, including double stacking of freight rail services, a northern rail bypass, reactivating regional freight lines and for statewide strategic freight network plans. These, of course, cost a lot of money to do but where there is a will, there is a way. In meeting with freight industry stakeholders, I know they are broadly supportive of moves to increase rail freight, acknowledging the road safety benefits and broader economic and productivity advantages of this approach.

We know that we are the only capital city in the country that encourages freight trucks to pass right through our CBD on their journey and the opposition is certainly supportive of efforts to reroute our freight haulage through the Greater Adelaide area, hopefully utilising the Greater Adelaide freight bypass into the future.

I have tried to keep my comments brief and touch only on a few aspects of the wonderful report of the Select Committee on Public and Active Transport that have caught my eye. Again, I want to recognise the Hon. Rob Simms for chairing this committee and thank everyone else in this committee and the many people who contributed to it. With that, I conclude my remarks and thank the committee for their work.

The Hon. R.A. SIMMS (23:15): I want to thank the Hon. Ben Hood for his contribution and other members who have contributed to this discussion previously. I should recognise that it is a real breakthrough that we have seen tonight because the shadow minister for transport has clearly read and engaged with the report but the Minister for Transport still has not done so. Despite the fact that this report was handed down nearly two years ago, the minister has still not engaged with the recommendations.

The Hon. Ben Hood, the shadow minister, was not even in the parliament when this committee met, yet he has taken the time to read through the report, to look at the recommendations, to form a view and to provide a report to parliament. Meanwhile, the minister is missing in action. I do not intend to go through all of the recommendations again because I have talked to them many times before, but I will say that one of the glaring themes that runs through the report is the need to improve the frequency and accessibility of public transport, particularly in the regions.

The Labor Party talk a big game about representing regional South Australia, but I do not think you can be fair dinkum about representing regional South Australia if you do not seriously engage with the public transport question. These recommendations are not ideological. They were consensus recommendations that were supported by representatives from across the parliament. It was a committee that included crossbenchers and Labor and Liberal representatives. They were very sensible recommendations and central to them was the idea of looking at how we can expand the outreach of transport in the regions in particular. Surely, this is something that this Malinauskas government should engage with.

On the first anniversary of this report being handed out, I organised a cake with members of the committee to celebrate a year anniversary since the report was handed down, with no response from the government. As we head into February, it will reach two years without a response and I expect I will be celebrating it once again with members of the committee. We are heading into the Christmas-New Year period and my message to the transport minister is, when he is setting his new year resolutions, maybe one of his new year resolutions should be to actually read the report, to pick up the phone to the Chair of the committee and arrange a meeting to finally talk about the recommendations and to finally provide a response to the parliament and to the over 100 South Australians who took the time to engage with this report.

When people engage with these committees, they do not expect that the report just gets spat out and put in the middle of a drawer somewhere, they actually expect that the government is going to engage with the content. That has not happened with this minister and that is very disappointing.

I do have a bill before parliament that would force the government to provide responses to select committees in a timely manner, and the failure to engage with this committee demonstrates why that bill is needed and it is one I intend to revisit in the new year. I thank members for their support of the work of the committee. In particular, I thank the Hon. Ben Hood for taking the time to read the recommendations and to engage with the work of the committee.

Motion carried.