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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-05-29 Daily Xml
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Public Transport

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The Premier is called to order. The Deputy Premier is called to order. The member for Port Adelaide is called to order.

The Hon. S.S. Marshall interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The Premier is warned.

Dr HARVEY: My question is to the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government. Will the minister inform the house how the establishment of a South Australian public transport authority will benefit commuters?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:39): I thank the member for Newland for his question. As somebody in the outer suburbs of north-eastern Adelaide, he takes a very keen interest in these matters and is very keen to see public transport services increased and improved for his area of South Australia.

We took a very exciting and innovative policy to the state election around a South Australian public transport authority. I don't mind telling the house that this was a policy put together by the member for Unley in the lead-up to the election, and I am extremely proud to be able to deliver—

Mr Koutsantonis: Before you sacked him—

The SPEAKER: I did not sack him, member for West Torrens. You will not interject.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL: —the member for Unley's commitment to South Australia. This is a policy which, at its very heart, gets back to why we need to have good and modern public transport services so that we can change towards having a system that is customer focused, a system that delivers efficient, effective and needed public transport systems that actually change, innovate and evolve along with the needs of commuters.

What we currently have in South Australia is a very old way of doing business for public transport. It needs to change. The conversations I have had since becoming the minister, and I know the conversations that the member for Unley had before the election, were all around reorienting the way we deliver this to maximise the benefit.

In South Australia, our public transport system does not provide the best service that it can for South Australians. In fact, we do not have the best rates of public transport use when we look at comparable cities in Australia and around the world. That is why reshaping this system into a South Australian public transport authority is a fantastic way to be able to reset the clock, look again at the assumptions that underpin our system and move forward with something that works better for more South Australians.

The previous government seemed to have—and when I say 'seemed to have' they definitely had—a fixation on trams. Essentially, it was trams or it was nothing. Trams can potentially be part of a considered solution for a public transport system, but they were asking the wrong question. The question they asked was, 'How do you deliver a tram network in Adelaide?' The questions that should have been asked but weren't are, 'How do we move the most amount of people in the most efficient way, delivering the best solution for the majority of South Australians? How do we make it about the customer as opposed to about the hard infrastructure that you put in the ground?'

That is why the former government's plan was not going to deliver for South Australia. It is why we rejected trams down to The Parade, and it is why we rejected trams in a whole series of areas—because it was the wrong question that was being asked. SAPTA is the best opportunity we have had in a generation to ask the right question, which is, 'How do we deliver better public transport services in South Australia?' That's a question we are going to answer over the coming months.

This is something we are going to take our time to get right because there is a world of opportunity out there. Public transport policy talks about high-capacity electric buses as a potential solution. There is a world of potential solutions for delivering public transport, some of them a lot less expensive and a lot more flexible than the plans the former government had on the table, and I look forward to exploring them over the coming year.

We have point-to-point transport and ride-share systems that might be able to be part of our public transport network. What we need is a government that stops thinking like it's 1950 and starts thinking like it is actually 2018. We need to look forward to the fact that in five to 10 years' time autonomous vehicles are going to be part of our public transport system, and we need a South Australian public transport authority that delivers on all those potential promises and delivers a better service for South Australians.

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