“Get this mess sorted” – Ryan Park on Gong Shuttle

Speaking in parliament on Thursday afternoon, the Labor spokesman for the Illawarra put forward a motion calling on the government to drop any decision to introduce fares on the free shuttle.

Mr Park also pushed the government to wrap up the long negotiations on the shuttle funding.

“I’ll give you a timetable,” Mr Park said.

“How about you, by the end of this week, get this mess sorted once and for all? Because you have had months to do it. You have had plenty of time to get it sorted.”

In December Wollongong City Council and the University of Wollongong agreed to jointly fund the $700,000 shortfall to keep the shuttle free for the next three years.

Since then, Transport for NSW has been in negotiations with both bodies – only informing them late last month that the funding offer was not enough.

Mr Park ridiculed the government for taking so long to sign off on the funding arrangement.

“This is a government that has got its priorities wrong,” he said.

“It can’t even accept money put forward by Wollongong City Council and the University of Wollongong to contribute to the service.

“It can’t even do a deal with when somebody else is doing the heavy lifting for them.”

He said it made no sense to make cuts to a bus that was delivering on public transport goals like increasing usage and reducing congestion.

“It is simply phenomenal in this day and age that we have a situation where a government would scrap a public transport service that is going above and beyond all of the KPIs,” he said.