Today Abigail contributed to a debate in Parliament on an active transport Bill relating to micromobility, vehicles and smartcards, condemning both major parties for decades of failure on accessible transport and rejecting the idea that disability access should rely on unused Opal balances, instead demanding proper, dedicated funding to meet overdue accessibility obligations.
Abigail said:
I contribute to debate on the Road Transport and Other Legislation Amendment (Micromobility Vehicles and Smartcards) Bill 2025. I obviously commend and support the comments made by my colleague Ms Cate Faehrmann. As The Greens spokesperson for disability, I want to briefly respond to some of the commentary in this debate. The Greens are in fervent agreement that there is woefully inadequate investment in disability accessibility to transport. It is not a new problem. I spoke yesterday about all of the ways that people with disability are continually overlooked and actively let down by the major parties—not just by this Government, but by the former Government as well. Our public transport network remains shamefully inaccessible, with investment in accessibility upgrades in every budget, year after year, failing to make the cut.
New South Wales is over three years past the deadline that was signed onto over 20 years ago to meet the disability standards for accessible public transport, and Transport for NSW says that people with disability will be waiting at least another 47 years before all stations are accessible. That is a shame on the former Government, but it is also a shame on this Government. In 2019 I asked the then Minister for Families, Communities and Disability Services, Gareth Ward, what he was doing to meet the deadline set by all the States and Territories in 2001 that would require them to have fully accessible transport by now. He said that there had not even been an audit of what they needed to do at that point, let alone the process of working out a schedule of what needed to happen.
Neither major party has a leg to stand on when it comes to accessible transport, and people with disability are sick and tired of being used as a political football, of being used as a prop for moralising against political opponents only to be promptly discarded once the political moment passes, and of being exploited, abused and disrespected by political leaders who see them as a special interest group and not as full and vibrant human beings with agencies and rights and deserving of every level of inclusion as any other person in our community. People with disability should not have to rely on money being found by unorthodox methods in order to have their most basic needs met.
The Greens reject in its entirety the argument that the only way people with disability could hope to get accessibility upgrades is by scooping up unused Opal balances. People with disability are more than an afterthought. People with disability deserve so much more than the sum total of what has been forgotten and overlooked. If the Government genuinely believes in accessibility for disabled people, it would find the money in the budget. That is actually what is required under human rights obligations. But year after year, government after government and legacy party after legacy party treat people with disability as a nice to have, a political prop and an afterthought. The Greens reject that framing in its entirety and demand full funding for disability accessibility because bus trip detritus is not good enough.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
20 November 2025