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Conference speeches: August–September 2006

Bundaberg U3A Conference and Pensioners and Superannuants Conference

Background
In the next few months Queensland Transport will be seeking to pull together the series of trials and papers of the last six years into a coherent government policy statement.

The key step to this process will be an issues/options paper for public comment towards the end of the year.

To assist in this process, the department proposes to convene a stakeholders’ forum towards the end of October.

OPSO has accepted the department’s invitation to organise and run this forum.

The following two conference papers in different ways contributed to this theme.

U3A Conference
The U3A conference paper was given as the first speech off the rank: the audience was fresh and ready to participate. I had been asked to speak on health and transport, and to get the audience involved. Few of the audience came from Brisbane so on transport I talked on the trials in regional Queensland that I have included below in the Pensioner and Superannuant Conference report.

I also held a Speakout giving the audience an opportunity as stakeholders to put forward their comments on one of the trials that was in that local region of North and Central Burnett.

They agreed it was at least something ... it provided a long-distance bus service twice a week between Maryborough and Biloela, a weekly service between Eidsvold and Bundaberg, with a connecting service from Monto using the school bus, and a weekly service between Mundubbera and Bundaberg , Gayndah, Ban-Ban Springs and Biggenden. Local people spoke of the need for local answers, and this was developed by others from different regions.

The audience agreed that the stakeholder forum was essential. They supported local involvement and local answers, making it clear that outside the southern Brisbane and Gold Coast regions very little had changed.

The remainder of the speech and Speakout was on nursing homes and the results will be included in that OPSO project.

Pensioner and Superannuant Conference presentation
As the other two speakers were departmental people speaking about the services available and proposed in the south-east corner, I spoke on the lack of services in the rest of Queensland and the trials that are in progress.

OPSO has been travelling the north and west of the state at least once every two years for 11 years and some of us since the mid-’80s. As far as transport goes, very little has changed. It can best be summed up in a poem I wrote in 2004. After listening to what the people from the regions wanted by 2020, their replies always were: they needed transport now.

What men make women travel
For hours torn with pain,
Where loneliness and suicide
Feed a country starved for rain.

What men make women travel
Many hours from their home,
Wait three weeks to have their babies
In a distant town alone?

Who fails to pay the bureaucrats
Enough to let them stay
The weeks they need to study
What works the western way?

To let them sit and listen
And even understand
That the east and west are different
In this dry and golden land.

As they sit and watch their townships die
And their children go away,
They know each town has answers
If the bureaucrats could stay.

So they may not have a dentist,
Local bus and all the rest . . .
For there’s never many votes, you see,
In the women of the west.

The transport needs of our rapidly growing population were first recognised by the State Government in a discussion paper, ‘Safe Mobility for All for Life’. Earlier discussion had ignored the huge changes and needs that are to take place to meet the needs of a growing ageing population.

OPSO drew the Premier’s attention to this omission with the result that an across-government symposium with experts on ageing from overseas was held, followed by an across-government conference involving four research papers and general discussion to point the way ahead to address these changes. The ‘Safe Mobility for All’ paper was the first of its kind in Australia.

This paper went to Cabinet and was approved subject to trials.

Following the Delivering Flexible Transport conference in 2003, some door-to-door response initiatives to meet the needs of older people were set up in Mt Tambourine using taxis to run a timetabled service, and Boreen Point at Noosa with a timetabled taxi service with three return services a day, run by the Transport Department and local council. At Kango (in Toowoomba), Queensland Transport is trialing a taxi industry booking and dispatch technology to a roaming door-to-door bus service.

Local answer trials for non-emergency patients offered by the Renal Unit shared taxi service and the Mt Gravatt Hospital Flyer might suggest models for the regions, where getting to the hub hospitals from local towns, often some hundreds of miles away, is a major problem. When an ambulance is away on this business, a town is left without emergency transport. It is essential that this is addressed across the state as a matter of priority.

Answers to problems across regional Queensland may well be found in the collaborative partnership between Queensland Transport and the Local Government Association, which in the next two to three months will launch two documents: a transport development tool-box and community-based transport guidelines for local councils. These do-it-yourself tools for community groups and local councils will help to empower community groups and workers to take action for themselves in developing solutions to their enormous unmet needs.

The preferred model for this could be a non-government person at state level with a pot of money that could be distributed via a Transport Department person heading each region, (regions based on transport needs, not political boundaries) to local communities. These would develop their own answers to local needs under local leadership.

Such options are one of the many things that need to be discussed at the October Forum.

– Val French,
President