Article: Transport trials a joke

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Transport trials a joke

Transport trials a joke
Article from: The Courier-Mail

By Terry Sweetman

May 16, 2008 12:00am

IT'S 8am-ish and a frazzled commuter just misses his train because he is vainly trying to thread his way through the Go Card-constipated turnstile system at Central Railway Station.

It's 7.30pm-ish the same day and the weary toiler is left standing on the wrong side of the the cut-off point as the bus pulls away choked to the gills with strap-hangers. He can wait another 30 minutes or he can leg it.

It's 5am-ish the next day and he reads that somebody called Robert Hough, author of the ridiculous gravy train scandal, will only suffer a nominal pay penalty for what Crime and Misconduct Commission chairman Robert Needham described as a "gross error of judgment".

And that will probably be fully commuted in the new financial year, leaving our traveller to wonder just how gross an error has to be before something serious happens in the upper stratosphere of politics and public service.

The events might seem disconnected and purists will point to the different political parentages of the rail and bus systems but it somehow seems academic to the long-suffering commuter.

The reality is that we have a public transport system that is fast-tracking from the dismal to the disastrous and the best the Government can do is send in the clowns.

And the clowns don't know the difference between an almost constructive idea and yet another exercise in too-smart-by-half politics.

Had the Citytrain outing and boxed lunch laid on for a bunch of Labor Party hacks been replicated in a Thomas the Tank Engine Day for, say, the Chamber of Commerce we could have accepted it as the sort of out-of-the-square consultative process that made Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2020 summit a one-day wonder.

But, no, an unelected functionary with unknown credentials managed to turn it into a $3000 political disaster zone.

And with the truth drawn out like hold-fast wisdom teeth, the explanatory process degenerated into another insult to our collective intelligence.

The only advances in public wisdom are the confirmation that Transport Minister John Mickel and trouble are like Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, that stupidity is not a sin under the terms of reference of the CMC, and that errant policy advisers have little to fear in the way of professional accountability or discipline.

Privately, Mickel seems at least to have learnt the virtue of silence, which is wise given his recent calamitous radio fireside chats that demonstrated little more than the fact he wouldn't know a train was behind him unless it sounded its whistle.

But officially, we are none the wiser about how much Mickel knew about this foolish exercise.

He was at the meeting at which the gravy train was cooked up and four of his closest staff knew what was afoot, but he knew nothing.

Believe him, and his ignorance seems limitless.

If you think there must be a limit to his ignorance, you have to harbour grave doubts about his concern for the truth.

But, sorting the political chaff from the policy wheat, the real problem is that the senior policy adviser to a senior minister in a critical portfolio did not have the acumen, the sense of probity, the understanding of process, the basic business manners and common nous to recognise that it was wrong to use his public office to organise a private political event.

This was not exactly a sterling performance from a bloke on what is probably a $100,000-plus package. (His salary penalty was calculated on his $71,354 base salary, and doesn't include minor items such as a car and other perks.)

It again casts doubts on the quality of ministerial advice in a system that makes plum jobs an unaccountable political gift.

Hough might well be the smartest cat in George St, but we are yet to see any evidence apart from some malodorous droppings.

Meanwhile, the transport system fails to deliver on its core business of getting people from A to B.

The CityCat service has turned into just another commuter drudge, the train system is an aluminised testament to a 19th-century culture of casual inefficiency, and the bus system is a bad joke.

And Go Card, the headline initiative of the past decade, is a dog that is foisted on a travelling public that has good reason not to trust it.

The Government continues to whistle in the dark and bombard us with brazen nonsense, but Go Card is an expensive, inefficient, barely workable rip-off that demands an inquiry into its conception, its development, its introduction and its future viability.

I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that Go Card is any advance on any system in any metropolitan transport system anywhere in the developed world.

Meanwhile, the presumed best brains of government are consumed by an off-peak excursion and a boxed lunch for a favoured few and a now routine campaign of cover-up and confusion.

Somehow, the joke seems lost on the bloke whose day ends with a microwaved dinner and an abbreviated evening.