Page 2257 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 June 2005
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MR PRATT: Put a sock in it, John! This vandalism is not just unpleasant looking, it is illegal and costs the ACT taxpayer $1 million every year, defacing public as well as private assets. This cost is on top of the cost not recorded by this government; that is, the cost of the clean up to all the private property owners in Canberra, who also bear the brunt of this problem, a problem that this minister unfortunately finds acceptable and one which his government even encourages.
I have been advised that Calwell shopping centre alone recently forked out $600 to clean up graffiti that was scrawled across their centre in just one weekend. Because there was gratuitous graffiti involved with that, thankfully—after some pressure—the department also provided $400 for the clean up and, therefore, the total cost of the task was $1,000. If you multiply that figure by all the shopping centres in Canberra, over all the numbers of times that this occurs, and add that to the $1 million spent cleaning up government assets, then the true cost of graffiti vandalism to the community is enormous—many millions of dollars, I would guess.
The hypocrisy of the urban services minister astounds me. On the one hand the minister is saying that charities should not have to bear the brunt of a problem that costs charities about $50,000 a year to clean up—a policy that I support—yet he has no sympathy whatsoever for the private property owners who wear the significant cost of cleaning up graffiti vandalism, which is happening through no fault of their own. The government has acted to crack down and get tough on charity bin dumping but not on graffiti vandals. The government’s approach is inconsistent. What is the point in targeting charity bin dumping, but not graffiti, which is also an ugly, widespread and illegal problem and which does nothing to improve the state of Canberra or the community’s confidence and safety?
I now want to turn to the matter of the maintenance of ovals. There is advice from the CSIRO that there are methods of watering ovals and parkland that can save about 25 per cent of water, using the government’s current irrigation systems. There were recommendations made in 2003-04 about this. There is clearly no evidence that this government has considered adopting such maintenance strategies to (a) save on precious water and (b) save the assets.
A very significant number of ovals are in a terrible state. Not only are they unable to be used and provide a service to the community and our schools but they also make the general community look extremely untidy. They will eventually cost a lot more to save and be recovered. In fact, about $15,000 per hectare is the minimum figure I have been advised. The satellite images of our suburbs being published daily in the Canberra Times show that there is barely a usable oval in sight. This is not entirely the fault of the drought but partly the fault of this government in its failure to ensure that these assets are managed properly during such times.
Chisholm community oval, in the area immediately west of Chisholm primary school, is one of the worst cases I have seen across the ACT. This oval is well loved by the broader Chisholm community. I have met a delegation of local residents, who have been very thoughtfully concerned and constructive in their arguments about that. I am advised by this group that this oval was in the past, before it deteriorated to the point of being unusable, broadly used by many members of the community for a wide range of
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