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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-02-06 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

SCHOOL BUS LICENCE RENEWALS

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:06): Today, in order to highlight to the house a very serious problem in my electorate, I wish to read into the Hansard a letter which appeared in the local edition of The South Eastern Times in Millicent in my electorate. The letter is headlined 'Furner couple driven mad'. The letter says:

The last straw!

After 30 years of bus driving we are putting on the brakes for good.

Furner mums and dads, don't despair, we have retired from driving the school bus to Kangaroo Inn not because of your children, but because of bureaucratic rubbish which is thrown at us to maintain our drivers' accreditation.

To the uninformed, we drivers have to pass a police check and identification to hold our bus licence to verify who we are and to qualify as good citizens to convoy your children to school.

This year Barb's accreditation fell due for renewal.

She was advised to do the renewal at Mount Gambier as Millicent Police Station was not able to do the task of filling out the form.

On the first trip to Mount Gambier, Barb was sent home again as she had to produce enough identification to prove who she was.

A total of 100 points was required and she was 10 points short.

A birth certificate and driver's licence with a photograph was not good enough.

So the 140km round trip was wasted.

She returned as she was told utility accounts will help to get points—why, I don't know as there are no photographs on them.

Anyway, water rates and power bills were not good enough because they were in husband Steve's name.

So she went home again, with another 140km trip wasted.

On the third time she had a driver's licence, birth certificate and council rates.

Surely she had to be right this time.

But she was sent home again and another 140km trip was wasted.

They claimed the birth certificate extract was not good enough, it had to be the original.

So sorry Furner parents, we give up.

After 30 years of bus driving, we still don't qualify.

Steve and Barb Bellinger

'Goodnwindi' Furner.

This little letter highlights some of the bureaucratic nonsense that good citizens of this state have to put up with. I accept, my constituents accept and I am sure everybody in this state accepts that we need to do everything we can to protect our children, but this letter highlights the nonsense that is put in front of good upstanding citizens, who have years and years of experience in conveying students to and from school in a school bus, and the hoops that they have to jump through.

It is bad enough that they have to jump through these hoops after having an unblemished 30-year record but then, when they try to do the right thing, they are frustrated in the way that has been explained in this letter. This government continually tells the people of South Australia that we have record numbers of police. What they do not say to the people of South Australia is that those police are managed in a way which seriously diminishes their functionality.

In a country town, it is no good having police unless you can actually get some service delivered from them, and time and time again across my electorate constituents come to me because they cannot get service at their local police station. Notwithstanding that there are significant numbers of police assigned to a station, they are invariably told they have to go to the next town to get some sort of service.

Mount Gambier is not central to the South-East of the state. It is certainly not central to my electorate, yet my constituents are continually referred to Mount Gambier for these minor obligations. Why is it that people have to drive an additional 100-odd kilometres just to fill out a form to satisfy this sort of obligation?

Mr Griffiths: Madness.

Mr WILLIAMS: It is, as my colleague next to me, the member for Goyder, said, madness. It is madness and, as the Leader of the Opposition has been saying in recent days, this government has been putting the brakes on our economy. This is the sort of nonsense, the red tape nonsense, which is part of that handbrake on our economy, when people are forced to travel long distances and then frustrated not once, not twice, but three times. Goodness knows, I have great sympathy for constituents who, after having gone through all of that, throw their hands up in the air and say, 'Damn it, I'm not even going to bother again.'

This is the sort of thing that is happening daily right across South Australia, this is why this state's economy is struggling, this is why revenues to the government are falling, and this is why this government has created a mess in South Australia.

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