Tuesday, 10 September 2019

 Mr O’DONOHUE (Eastern Victoria) (17:46): I raise a matter for the attention of the Minister for Public Transport, and it relates to public transport services on the Mornington Peninsula. As the minister would appreciate, the vast majority of public transport services on the Mornington Peninsula are buses. The Stony Point line does operate but only services part of the peninsula. Of course federal Labor, the national coalition and the state coalition all support the extension of the Frankston line to Baxter. It is the state Labor government that is the impediment to getting that infrastructure extended.

As I say, buses are critical to public transport on the Mornington Peninsula. Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, out of a sense of absolute frustration—and despite ongoing advocacy to, to be frank, state governments for many years—has now commenced an active campaign for better buses, seeking better public transport, better bus services, for the Mornington Peninsula. The Mornington Peninsula shire mayor has said that:

… 82 per cent of the region was without public transport and existing services were infrequent, indirect, unreliable and overcrowded.

He said the network had reached a ‘breaking point’ and $10 million a year of investment in bus services would fix many of the issues. This is obviously a critical issue for people of the peninsula, many of whom need to access Melbourne for work and for health services—particularly the major hospitals in Frankston. The particular focus is extra buses on the Portsea to Frankston service, route 788, which carries approximately 500 000 passengers a year and could carry many more with better, more frequent services.

As someone who grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, I am often amazed that the bus service timetable seems awfully familiar and awfully similar to the bus service timetable I recall when I was a young person trying to get around the peninsula myself. There are no cross-peninsula bus services, making it very difficult for people to cross from one side of the peninsula to the other. The peninsula seems to lose when it comes to government investment. It does not qualify for Regional Development Victoria funding yet does not get the investment in metropolitan public transport and other services. So the action I seek is for the minister to meet with Mornington Peninsula Shire Council and to fund the increased services to give the peninsula a public transport system it can rely upon and can use.