Re: [Sydney] Ticketing - was Light Rail into the CBD?

["Bradley Torr" <truenorth@one.net.au.SPAMTRAP>]

a n d R e w ; <rods42@hotmail.com> wrote in article
<9f56m4$3sr$1@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au>...

> The last time I looked, you have to be willing to accept any job
> with up to 90 mins travel time each way in order to keep on
> receiving a Centrelink payment (eg. if you were offered a job
> with 80 mins travel time and refused it because it would take
> too long to travel, you would get penalised by Centrelink).

When I was on unemployment last year and I asked the fellows down at
Centrelink about this, they said that the 90 minutes was just a 'guideline'
issued by the Department of Social Security and that there really was no
fixed guide - the regulations (or legislation, as may be the case) merely
says 'reasonable distance' - a manager there said that 'reasonable' was
defined as 'if there's anybody in your neighbourhood who travels a certain
distance to work, then you should be able to do that too.'

They couldn't be specific as to what 'reasonable distance' was in my case,
and I wasn't about to knock on 200 doors in my neighbourhood to ask 'So
mate, where abouts do you work?'

I wonder how this rule applies to people who have poor access to public
transport - someone has a car and drives 90 minutes to work; an unemployed
person without a car has to catch a bus or train which takes 150 minutes -
is he still expected to travel the same distance?

At the time I was on unemployment, and I wasn't living too close to a
railway station - about half an hour's walk through a very shady area
dominated by prostitutes, drunkards, junkies and not very well lit, and
with no integrated bus/rail connection, last bus around 8pm. It usually
took me well over two hours to get to the city centre of Sydney - and these
days, employment tends to be much more dispersed around Sydney, so many
jobs would have been much much farther.

As it happens, I know that there were people in my precinct who worked in
Sydney, but they all drove - as railway station parking is extremely
limited and the buses here are abysmal when it comes to integration with
the trains.

Regards
BT