Queensland has had 50c fares for a couple of years now. Queensland "not following suit" doesn't exactly mean the same thing as states leaving their public transport at full price
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
61 points (98.4% liked)
Australia
4926 readers
164 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You know, when I was in Australia I mostly relied on public transport and I thought that not only was it more reliable than here in Germany (not a huge surprise), but a lot cheaper, too.
I think I paid under $50 to get from Sydney to Wagga via TrainLink, in a first class carriage. You pay well over $200 for similar fares over here.
Both The Greens and The Liberals had 50c fares as one of their policies in the SA election. It's easy to make those types of promises when you know you're not forming government, but I wonder if it points to an appetite in the community for more affordable public transport. I dismissed it prior to these emergency measures coming in elsewhere, but now I wonder if that news will stir up similar demands here. Then again, Labor just won in a landslide so it's not like they're under any immediate pressure to make big changes.
Free public transport just drives down quality, because voters generally don't approve of that much spending on other people's public transport (private transport though, that's a different matter).
I'm in Melbourne. It's like $5 for a 2 hour fare. If you're going 100km in that 2hr it's a great deal. But if you're going 1 or 2km it's cheaper to drive.
They need to be able to ramp-up services to cope with any increased demand.
Providing free transport is pointless if there aren’t enough trains.
Providing free transport is pointless if there aren’t enough trains.
Tasmanian . there are no trains, we closed them all decades ago, we've dug a deep fucing hole with a big stupidity shovel of diesel reliance that beggars belief,
we're spending billions on a football stadium and have no trains, shitty education and shitty healthcare... fuck endless conservative voters but it is what it is.
endless conservative voters
Always the same bunch of idiots ruining for the rest of us.
No one pays for the bus or tram in Melbourne anyway, this isn't going to make much difference
I quite like the thing the ticket inspectors do where they get on and conspicuously announce their presence so everyone has a chance to escape. I did see a woman with poor english get kicked off a tram recently though, which seemed more like bullying the visitor as she probably assumed you could tap in with your credit card like a normal system.
We already made it free for eshays.