Jo Haylen, Member for Summer Hill, has today expressed shock that the Berejiklian Government is wasting $1 million a month to survey customers attitudes towards the state’s trains when the community’s dismay at the state of public transport is so well known.
The State Government was forced to reveal the size of the two-year “customer experience” contract with consultants Ernst & Young after questions from Labor.
The $24 million contract, which ends on January 8 2019, is understood to be one of the largest and most expensive customer surveys ever undertaken by government in Australia.
The task according to the State Government’s tender is to measure the “customer experience of services provided by Sydney Trains and NSW Trainlink… to provide a meaningful measurement framework to track change in customer experience” - or in other words a survey.
The state’s trains, and in particular those in Sydney, have been hit by continued delays and occasional chaos as a result of the introduction of a new timetable in late November by Transport Minister Andrew Constance.
On January 8th and 9th the trains went into meltdown because they were unable to cope with the demands of the new timetable. Labor has consistently criticised Mr Constance for his failure to provide enough resources to ensure the new services could be delivered, a conclusion that train bosses reached last week when they delivered their report into the meltdown.
Quotes attributable to Shadow Minister for Transport Jodi McKay
“This is a wholly unnecessary and wasteful exercise. The Premier and her Transport Minister don’t need to spend a million dollars a month to find out what people think of his trains, he could go down to Town Hall or Central stations with a clipboard and find out for himself.
“In the aftermath of the train meltdown earlier this year the Premier and her Transport Minister meanly refused to refund travellers who had spent hours getting home yet he thinks nothing OF spending millions of taxpayer dollars to ask them what they think. It’s a cruel joke.
“The secret contract has been up and running for almost a year but Transport Minister Andrew Constance doesn’t appear to have learned anything from it. He is still the same old Andrew Constance – arrogant, belligerent and incompetent.”
Quotes attributable to Member for Summer Hill Jo Haylen
“The Transport Minister should redirect the $1 million dollars a month he is wasting on expensive community surveys to fixing Sydney’s public transport system.
“As his decision to privatise our buses shows, this Minister will ignore any criticism that inner west residents offer anyway.
“The inner west has seen the worst of what the Minister can do- privatised buses, train timetable cuts and bus stop removal. There is more chaos on the way. The Minister knows what we think about his disastrous decisions. He times for him to listen.”