Today in Parliament, Abigail gave notice of a motion on how the privatisation of our buses has delivered worse services for commuters, higher costs for taxpayers and lower pay and conditions for drivers.

Abigail said:

I give notice that on the next sitting day I will move:

(1)     That this House notes that:

• public transport is a public good. Its value extends beyond its direct profitability, and goes to the heart of what we value in our society,
• a well-functioning public transport system is vital for the economic health of our state, for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for ensuring community mobility and equity,
• the people of New South Wales deserve accessible, affordable, frequent and reliable public bus services, and
• over the last decade, the Liberal-National Government in NSW has privatised every last one of our bus services, and the vast majority of our bus services are now run by large national and multinational companies. The result of which has been disjointed and unreliable services and a workforce unfairly lumped with lower pay and far worse conditions,
• in September 2022, Portfolio Committee No. 6 - Transport, chaired by Abigail Boyd MLC handed down its report ‘Privatisation of bus services’, which found that: the privatisation of bus services in New South Wales has created an incentive for private companies to sacrifice the needs of more vulnerable people in order to cut costs while still appealing to a wide enough user base to meet their contractual obligations and that the privatisation of bus services in Sydney and Newcastle has resulted in more limited service delivery, higher costs for passengers and worse pay and conditions for bus drivers, and recommended that the NSW Government revert bus services to being publicly-owned-and-operated for bus services in the four recently privatised Contract Regions in metropolitan Sydney (Contract Regions 6, 7, 8 and 9) that were previously operated by the State Transit Authority, and bus services delivered under the integrated public service contract for Newcastle, and
• contract region 6 in Sydney was due to expire and be re-tendered in June 2026, but in mid-2025 its contract was extended for a further 2 years without going to tender, in an active perpetuation by the NSW Labor government of the privatisation of bus services in the Inner West and southern suburbs with services extending to the Sydney CBD, Chatswood, Taronga Zoo, Westfield Eastgardens, Bondi Junction, Hurstville and Miranda.

(2)      That this House further notes that:

• on 12 March 2026 the McKell Institute published a report ‘Private Gain, Public Pain: Why the Privatisation of Newcastle's Bus Network Has Been a Failed Experiment’,
• the report reveals Newcastle Transport ranked 8th out of 9 operators in performance across outer metropolitan NSW, while the value of the contract has ballooned from around $450 million to more than $600 million, and
• the McKell Institute report finds the privatisation experiment in Newcastle has failed and calls for the network to be brought back into public hands when the current contract expires in 2027.

(3)     That this House calls on the NSW Government to act on the recommendations of both the 2022 Transport Portfolio Committee inquiry report ‘Privatisation of bus services’ and the McKell Institute report Private Gain, Public Pain: Why the Privatisation of Newcastle's Bus Network Has Been a Failed Experiment’, and take immediate action to unwind the privatisation of bus services in NSW, including re-establishing public operation at the conclusion of the Newcastle contract in 2027.

26 March 2026