Thank you for being out here today to defend your bus services.
What is clear with this State Government is that when it comes to public transport, they have no shame.
It’s not good enough they’ve bought overseas made trains that don’t fit the tracks, ferries that can’t sail at night or cope with big swells, or light rail trams that are cracked and out of service for up to a year and a half, they’ve also privatised bus services across our city.
In the Eastern suburbs, the Government is now cutting bus services and ripping out stops, all to force passengers on to their failed CBD & Eastern Suburbs Light Rail.
The Light Rail cost $3 billion - double what they said it would cost.
It was delayed time and time again.
The trams were built in France, losing us precious local jobs, and now we know they can’t even be used on the Inner West Light Rail because the Government made the two lines incompatible.
Eastern suburbs residents love their bus services and love their bus drivers.
I’ve seen first hand what happens when this Government privatises bus services: In my electorate, in Sydney’s inner west, they privatised Region 6 and we saw all the same tricks - pulling out stops, cutting back services, all with the promise that passengers would be better off.
Well, inner west passengers are not better off.
With this Government, you get privatisation, offshoring and deceit.
Thank you for being here today and taking the fight up to them.
And because of your ongoing, tenacious campaign, I can announce today that Labor and concerned members of the crossbench have won an Inquiry into this Government’s underhanded, deceitful tactics on privatisation and its impacts on workers and passengers.
Because we know that when you privatise transport services, the passengers and workers always lose.
And we must expose what the Government is up to here - their cuts to your bus services are nothing more than an underhanded attempt to force you on to the failed light rail.
They must be stopped.
So let’s keep up the fight.