Hundreds Meet to demand the Sacking of Connex : Melbourne Indymedia

The Wesley Church in Lonsdale St was tonight filled to capacity as hundreds of people attended a "Sack Connex" Public Meeting.
The meeting was also attended by a healthy mix of mainstream and alternative media outlets - not to mention Connex PR people.
The first speaker for the evening was Rob Gell former weatherman turned environmentalist who spoke eloquently on the Climate Crisis we face and how pitiful current privatised public transport services are in the face of this crisis. Currently 9% of all trips in Melbourne are on PT whilst in a city like Zurich it is approaching %50 of trips. Australia's greenhouse emmissions from the transport sector are still increasing at a rapid rate.
Next spoke Fiona Taylor - a representative of the Our Public Transport Campaign - a recently formed small grass roots action based group demanding the return of PT to public ownership. The crowd responded enthusiastically to Fiona's passion and anger of the hundreds of thousands of commuters who wait in the cold around Melbourne for crappy services. She also highlighted the social cost to the young and others whose social and economic life suffer from a lack of services in the outer suburbs. Her speech resonated as an "average commuter" rather than a PT expert.
Lastly - Paul Mees, a well known and active PT academic spoke of the farce that the State Government now spends almost double in subsidies for the private companies to run a crap service than it cost to run the system under public ownership. He also highlighted the army of beauracrats who are paid millions to regulate (not run) our PT system. Last year alone Connex sent $35 million of profits to the shareholders of its parent company in France.
The meeting was a success because it gave a collective voice to the otherwise atomised discontent of Melbourne's commuters. This success needs to be built on to pressure the state government to do the right thing before November and announce they are taking the PT system back into public ownership and massively increasing spending on PT compared to roads to solve Melbournes environmental and social transport crisis.