Senator John McGahon- speech from 16 Dec 2021

Thank you very much, Cairlock, and just to start off by wishing you, Cairlock, a happy Christmas, and Martin and everyone else who makes this place such a special place to be every day. Cairlock, when I first came into this house, one of the first things I discussed was the concept of commuters and providing tax saver tickets. We're now just about 20 months into this, and the NTA still have not produced a three-day tax saver ticket or a flexible ticket. I've been engaging with them every month. My friend, Senator Buttermeer, accuses me of being dramatic on certain occasions, but I would literally get more information out of North Korea than I would out of the NTA. Like, to get one-sentence responses back to say, we're trying to introduce this, to say, we haven't decided if we need legislative change or not. For me to then go to the Minister for Finance to actually get it in writing to say, you do not need legislative change, here's the response, you can introduce a flexible ticket. It would not require a change to tax legislation, and then to come back with a one-sentence response to say, well, we're still looking at it. Like, that's just not good enough in this day and age that we're getting one-line, two-line responses, and it's literally trying to have to drag the information out of a body about it. And the other issue we have is that it's not necessarily, you know, I can't put down commencement debates about it, it's not the NTA aren't responsible to this house, the NTA, you know, it's difficult to get those types of responses back from them. They have said to me that it's due to be introduced in Q1 of next year. That will be then two years pretty much into when this pandemic started. And I just think it is so not acceptable that when we are back working in the office properly from last September, seven, eight months in, and we still have people paying full monthly tickets or full annual tickets when they're only commuting to an office setting two or three days a week. And I would really appreciate it, Acting Leader, if you and your office could write to the NTA and hopefully you'll be more successful than I am in terms of trying to get some sort of information out of them about when it will be introduced.