Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Public Transport, and the action I seek from the minister is to appoint an expert panel to assess the viability of Victoria’s public transport privatisation model. It is kind of interesting that we are calling it privatisation, yet we seem to spend billions and billions of dollars on privatisation. I understand we have probably spent about $10 billion on contractors for the privatisation of our public transport. I am suggesting that an expert panel could provide insight into a better practice of contracting.
We have seen Dr John Stone, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Melbourne, explain that currently incentive payments are based on five factors. Three of those are secret, and the other two are customer satisfaction plus reliability and performance. That is all very well, except that they are self-assessed. So the private companies — and foreign governments partly own those private companies — are self-assessing whether they have done a good job. They are coming back to the government saying, ‘I’ve done a brilliant job. Pay me my subsidies and my bonuses’.
I think an expert panel would be best placed to provide some advice on this and improve what is a pretty high-quality service but also make it affordable for both governments and users. I also note that currently we collect money but we collect less than 24 per cent of our public transport expenditure, and this seems like something that could be remedied. I would like to see an expert panel introduced into the mix so we could leverage the public transport expertise in our state. An expert panel would be a very efficient way to do that.
See below for the answer to adjournment question
