On May 31, 300 people packed the Wesley Uniting Church in Melbourne's CBD for a public meeting organised by the LinkUp Melbourne campaign for the city's train and tram systems to be put back under public ownership when the contracts with the current private operators expires in November.
Speakers at the meeting included environmental campaigner, meteorologist and former TV weather presenter Rob Gell, Melbourne University academic Paul Mees and Fiona Taylor, a researcher for the OurPublicTransport.org.
The LinkUp Melbourne campaign has been endorsed by six Melbourne local councils and the Municipal Association of Victoria.
Gell argued the case for public transport as a means of averting catastrophic climate change. To achieve the necessary 90% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, radical changes were needed in the way we live, he said.
Gell pointed that at least half of Australia's GHG emissions come from hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. He argued that ending road transport as the main way that goods and people are moved is a prerequisite for tackling global warming. Only 9% of trips in Melbourne use public transport, compared to more than 50% in Zurich.
Taylor pointed to the isolation suffered by people in the suburbs due to the inadequacies of the public transport system, forcing households were forced to devote an ever increasing proportion of their incomes to maintaining and running cars in order to get to and from work.
She said that young people living in outer suburbs were unable to access employment and training opportunities because of lack of public transport. She painted an alternative vision in which no-one lived more than 400 metres from public transport, with services running every 10 minutes during the day and regular, though less frequent, services throughout the night.
Taylor suggested that Victorian transport minister Lynn Kosky's notorious lack of interest in public transport might be different if she actually had to use the system she is allegedly responsible for. Acknowledging the corporate interests benefiting from the privatised transport system, Taylor called for a mass-action based campaign for a publicly owned and publicly accountable transport system.
Mees explained that the public transport system working very well for the private operators like Connex, which repatriated $35 million profits from Melbourne to its parent company in France. He pointed out that the state Labor government is paying twice as much in subsidies to the private operators as it was spending on running the system before privatisation.
The system was also working well for the 350 highly paid government bureaucrats employed to "regulate" it. None of them, Mees argued, had any qualifications in public transport planning — their expertise being in public relations, law and marketing. Their efforts involved the much-publicised imposition of fines on the corporate operators for failure to meet service standards, fines that amounted to a paltry 1.5% of the operators' profits.
All speakers pointed out that in calling for the return of Melbourne's transport system to public ownership they were not simply calling for a return to what existed before privatisation, but a vastly expanded system that is
accountable to its workers and users. For more information visit http://www.linkupmelbourne.org.au or http://www.ourpublictransport.org.