Privatisation of Inner West Buses

After it was announced that the Liberal government would be pushing ahead with plans to privatise Inner West bus services, our office worked with Greens MP for Balmain Jamie parker, community groups, unions, and others to campaign to keep our public buses in public  hands.

Privatising our buses means they are run for a profit, instead of providing the quality public transport for our community. We know that the privatisation of our transport system only leads to fewer services, less reliability and higher fares.

Jenny has spoken out against the privatisation of public transport in Parliament on a number of occasions, including supporting a 10,000 signature petition opposing the privatisation of inner west buses in November 2017:

The Greens are committed to public transport. When we talk about public transport, we mean publicly operated and owned public transport. The idea of public transport being privately run or privately operated is bizarre. It is a completely inappropriate way to manage public transport in this State. The Greens commit to fight every day in this place for public transport to remain in public hands. If the Liberal Minister for Transport and Infrastructure proceeds to privatise inner west bus services then The Greens will call on a future Labor Government to commit to returning that service to public hands. The Greens are committed to seeing all privatised bus networks across the State returned to public hands—because public transport should be in public hands.

Read Jenny's full speech here.

And against the Liberal Government's plan to privatise more public bus services in June 2020:

If we are committed to the idea of creating jobs and having a world-class public transport system in this State, we need to recognise the importance of keeping the system public. We must recognise that if we want to deal with the challenges that face us ahead, we need to do everything we can to create more public jobs and more jobs that are in the interests of serving our community members during this time.

Watch Jenny's full speech in Parliament here.