Free Public Transport for Students
Mon, 20 Nov 2006.
Seriously?
One of the Victorian Liberal Party’s promises just confounds me. They promise to provide free public transport to students (PDF 90kB).
Little Johnny
Look, public transport is expensive. But to me, it feels like it is money being thrown into the wrong place. For one thing, you’re not making the education any better. Don’t expect to see a sudden increase in attendance rates because little Johnny doesn’t have to fork out the money for a bus ticket.
If you want to improve the education system, you would throw money at the places that need it. Things like lowering class sizes, millions of dollars of teaching equipment, lots of new teaching jobs, incentives for studying to be a teacher are all great election promises that I could give a cursory thumbs-up to. They are the sort of election promises that I can nod to and if you are elected, I would never ever find out if you kept your promise. It’s win-win!
Suburban Angst
But free public transport for students? Seriously? The majority of students I see on the train are smug private school students with blazers and ties and better mobile phones than me. They don’t need your charity. As a concerned voter, I want the government to be dipping into their pockets at every opportunity.
The other type of students I come in contact with are university students. The ones that are government supported could probably use a little more support; so give them more money. The ones that aren’t supported are drinking too much and could probably have a few less drinks every week to pay for their train ticket.
Reach Your Target Audience
My advice for a public transport election promise? Promise to read the mX newspaper and hold the transport companies responsible for people’s complaints. Open up a dialogue and make a big show of working to make things better. If you can appease the cynics in the mX’s Talk section then you are doing a pretty damn good job.
Bang bang
My advice for an education election promise? Wave your hands about and make some weak promise to keep guns out of schools. There are too many smaller (but nonetheless important) issues inside education to get a far-reaching meaningful message to the voting public.
Public Transport is free for students in NSW (though there is the idea of an “exclusion” zone, say if you live within 15 min walk from school). When the government looked at cost cutting by saying it would no longer be free, there was an immediate outcry followed by a quick back-flip.
As a concerned voter without kids, your position is valid. But if you had kids, it would get you thinking “Well that’s another $30 per kid I don’t have to fork out each month”, you’re going to seriously consider that a worthwhile vote. Why, that’s $30 a month to compensate for the interest rate rises, and everything else that goes with it. Suddenly, it’s not costing anything to send your kid to school on public transport - why drive the kid there? Save 15 minutes in the car in the morning as well. That’s saving petrol too. It’s also looking like a green policy.
It’s not a education policy so much as a cynical effort in going for the wallet of the voter. They’re doing the fix-the-transport thing here in NSW before the March election, but infrastructure takes time - 2010 is the first scheduled delivery. The voting public doesn’t wait that long.
Politics at its finest, though didn’t the ALP promise something similar? The party that commits to a more comprehensive rail network gets my vote more than this wallet-finding exercise.
i think the liberals are trying to sell this more as a measure to ease pressure on family budgets. i agree with you that it wont help out studets or education though.
I’m always a little suspicious about calls for “millions of dollars of education equipment.” Is education equipment really what’s needed? How about we fund state schools enough so that they can keep their buildings clean and well-maintained first. Visit Blackburn High, see what I mean. Even after that, I think it’s more important to address the social issues of education then simply chucking science labs and computers at students. Just as the government should read the mX and work with transport companies to solve the issues there, they should pay attention to what’s actually happening in schools, and work with them to solve the genuine problems, not simply throw money at particular politically important issues.
That doesn’t win votes, though. Pity.
As for free transport, I do think it makes more sense to direct that to low-income earners- including, if you want, university students. More concerned about the un- or barely-employed, though, and overcoming obstacles to work (eg. living in broadie and not being able to get to an interview in Richmond.)
Its just another politcial stunt to win votes from the younger generation. The way the students would see free public transport - “Hey, this means when I go in to the city to pop some e’s and get drunk on the weekend I won’t have to remember how much it costs to get home on the train cos its free. I can now use the already discounted price of public transport to buy another drink, wooohooo!”
Good point, use the money to run trains after midnight. Surely that can’t cost more than $180,000/day? I’m not exactly sure, but I think Connex’s daily running costs are a smidge over $2 million, all told, so surely another 10% will do it for just another handful of trains.
I guess it’s hard to make up good transport policies when you have a car and a driver, though. Remember that one time that Bracks caught the train and was late to work?