New Parliamentary report urges NSW Government to reverse bus privatisation

With your support, we fought tooth and nail against the privatisation of our bus services.

While the NSW government sought to jeopardise our secure and reliable public buses and throw secure employment under the proverbial bus, we gathered the evidence and all your stories that clearly showed it was a terrible idea. Still, the NSW government went ahead with this plan and our public buses were no more.

Since then, it’s become clear that privatisation is the root cause of many shortfalls in bus services and is clearly eroding worker conditions and entitlements.

Working behind the scenes with our political allies, we successfully lobbied to have a parliamentary Inquiry into bus privatisation. While the terms of the inquiry related to Sydney, the Newcastle experience is completely relevant and our Novocastrian comrades were not left out.

This week, the NSW Legislative Assembly released a report that showed what we’d been telling them all along.

The report ultimately found that for commuters, the privatisation of our buses incentivised cost-cutting that has lead to limited services and higher transport fees. This negatively impacted many people who relied on safe, secure public transport to get where they need to go.

For workers, the result has been a consistent and widespread erosion of our long held entitlements and conditions. With TfNSW proving unwilling and unable to protect its workforce as they transitioned into the private sector, it’s fallen to the union to try and pick up the pieces to protect workers.

Read the full Parliamentary Report here

Out of the 11 recommendations given to the NSW government, the first one is a no-brainer:

“Recommendation 1: That the NSW Government give consideration to taking action to revert bus services to being publicly-owned-and-operated…”

We’re pleased to see that Parliamentary documentation has proven what bus drivers have known for years. However, it’s disappointing that it took so much suffering by workers and commuters before someone came to this conclusion.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on what the NSW government does next to respond to the report’s findings. You can expect to hear from us again with an update.

Public transport is a public service. We won’t rest until we see the return of our public buses, and the high-quality services that come with a secure and reliable public transport network.