I'm indebted to this publication (http://www.firstsamuel.com.au/wrydry/wrydry08-13.pdf) for the information that, apparently, Melbourne’s railway costs per passenger are 47% of Sydney’s.
I don't know if it's related, but I must admit that it strikes me as strange that, in Sydney, it seems to take 3 people to be involved before a train can leave a station (at least the larger ones) - namely, a person on the platform to wave a flag, a guard who rides in the middle of the train to shut the doors and, of course, a driver to drive the train.
Now, I know that here in Melbourne we sometimes have various people on the platform who help with the boarding process. For example, at Parliament, announcements are made urging passengers to get on board and to move down the train (sometimes an exercise in futility, when the train is full), And even at our local station there are a couple of station hosts who sometimes bid you "good morning" and even wave a white disk in the direction of the driver at times. But most of the time, trains seem to be able to depart under the sole control of the driver.
Perhaps the difference is that Victoria had Jeff Kennett and NSW had Ms Keneally and her predecessors!
Blame most of the system in NSW, but hey, leave the charming Christina K out of it! She knowingly and manfully drank her poisoned chalice to the last drop. Her loss to politics is our greatest loss in decades, for she is the last of our contemporary leaders with explicit conservative thought-through christian Values that inform her policy actions. I hope she will lay down her basketball some time in the future and offer herself for the House of Repesenatives. She could persuade me to join the ALP so long as I could join her faction. Maybe she might champion the Very Fast Train!
ReplyDeletePoint taken. Maybe the die was cast before Ms K attained a position of power, and there may not have been much that she could do (although, if I recall correctly, a rather restrictive enterprise bargaining agreement was entered into with the railway unions during her time).
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