Page 2258 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 June 2005
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activities. It is now fast turning into a dustbowl with a few hardy weeds scattered around. I understand too that the dust and debris is being blown into adjoining properties and around the street, making the general area look much more untidy.
I appreciate that it may not be possible to water general community ovals and green spaces with mainstream systemic water throughout the dry months, to keep the place alive, but we need to do something more than what we are seeing done now; that is, the government simply abandoning these ovals. Let us see a little bit of lateral thinking by this government; but perhaps we should not hold our breath in that regard. In the case of the Chisholm oval, for a fairly modest outlay you would consider that perhaps 100,000 to 200,000-litre storage tanks might even have been attached, for example, to collect the roof run-off from Chisholm primary school, because Chisholm primary school is uphill of Chisholm community oval.
I am not a scientist or an environmental engineer, but I have certainly had a lot of logistical and layman engineering experience in hard luck countries, in water winning programs. Therefore I think I am entitled to ask the question whether this can be done and what cost would be required. Would there be sufficient rain run-off around the year, in a drought year, from the very broad rooftop areas of the schools to provide some meaningful assistance? Perhaps I am wrong. If that is the case, then I will stand corrected, but I intend to find out. Would there be sufficient supplementary water to gravity feed, perhaps, at least some precious parts of Chisholm oval throughout the year? These are the questions the government itself should be asking and answering, and in a broader sense, of course, not simply in relation to Chisholm oval.
If this were to work, then I would maintain that we should implement a bold plan to capture water from suitable public buildings to irrigate adjacent oval and parkland areas. It is clearly not possible in this drought to water and maintain all of the green parkland and oval areas; but selected playing field-sized areas could be set aside for some sort of watering. At least the local communities would have something to play on or have picnics on. A checkerboard effect of some areas across the broader lands—green here and there—would be a lot more attractive than what we see now, which is a never-ending broad scape of dirt.
Having talked about the need to save and recover ovals, elsewhere we see a good deal of waste around the place. Coming to work on the morning of 14 June via Vernon Circle at about 10 past nine during an early morning shower after sustained weekend rain, I was astonished to find a sprinkler going on the side of the highway near City Hill. To me this smacks of an official, a public servant field director or field team leader simply arriving at work late and not making sure that the damn thing was turned off. I am writing to the minister about that, and I am extremely to keen to see why that was the case. On the one hand this government is not watering our ovals, yet it is wasting water in other areas during rain. Is that the case? That is what the public may generally draw a conclusion about.
Another lovely feature of the broader ACT landscape is the widespread dumping of car bodies, and people leaving them in situ for long periods of time. This dumping of car bodies is a fairly insidious problem, not just along main arterial roads, particularly at weekends after criminal activities, I suppose, or car-jacking, but also sometimes in properties in streets. They sit there for a very long time. People write in about this and
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