Public transport fare rises
Report in The Courier Mail 8th March: Both Labor and the LNP have refused to commit to a cap on 15% annual (public transport) fare rises.
I’m getting pretty good at translating this into population growth now.
Why are public transport fares rising? Sure as the population grows more people use the public transport. Is that why fares rise?
Partially but the whole reason is more to do with debt.
Population growth demands more infrastructure (500 more buses as Lord Mayor Graham Quirk tells us for Brisbane City Council) of all kinds. This costs a lot of money.
Somehow that money has to be found and paid for. There are two ways: Sell assets (and don’t we all scream!) or borrow the funds (and then we have debt; and debt has to be repaid with interest).
Debt is why our public transport fares are rising. The debt does not have to be directly to do with public transport infrastructre. It is general infrastructure debt that the government has taken on to provide enough facilities for us to avoid going too far backwards with all the growing population.
The government has to try to get some money from somewhere to pay the debt back with interest. They do this by raising our public transport fares (which are extremely high by world standards) and raising our energy costs and our water costs and our rates and any tax they can raise.
Population growth is very costly to all of us and it comes out through the increases to pay for the debt to pay for the extra infrastructure needed for the extra people.