Page 3324 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 September 2005
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oversight. Rangers may now target any person suspected of committing a littering offence, whatever their location, and ask them to produce suitable identification. As I say, we support this and we think this makes the 2004 legislation that much more viable.
The minister explained in June that this will ensure that rangers targeting such offences as charity bin dumping will have the official powers to request that identification be produced so that a fine or infringement notice may be issued. However, I must say that that explanation by the minister is pretty much an admission that the fines have in fact been issued illegally to litter offenders. So, again, I would ask the minister if we are barking up the wrong tree here. If he can explain that we are, then that will make me much happier.
It seems that the crackdown on charity bin dumping was because of pressure from the opposition and community groups to do something about that issue. We have seen other issues too around the streets. Now that the minister has cleaned up this legislation and made it much more precise, will he now look at the other issues we are concerned about which relate to littering; that is, the littering of car bodies; the littering of shopping trolleys; the general untidiness around the place; the question about the number of garbage bins located in shopping centres; and whether it has been good policy to start reducing the number of those public bins in shopping centres in accordance with other environmental objectives which seek to be achieved?
In principle, looking at environmental objectives against other waste policy strategies, the reducing the number of those would seem to be a fine thing, but we are getting reports back from other shopping centres and residents that, because there has been a 10 or 20 per cent reduction in community rubbish bins across shopping centres, there seems to be an increase in the amount of rubbish lying around. The opposition questions whether this has been a smart strategy after all. We want to know what the government is going to do to rectify what appears to be a problem with increased rubbish in shopping centres.
The government, I must say, has pretty much ignored keeping this territory of ours looking as spick and span as it used to be. We have talked in this place about the government’s failure to tackle graffiti properly and to follow up any strategies with meaningful measures to impede graffiti action. Their failure to do that means we still have a landscape that is looking deteriorated. While the government is now at least moving on the right track with littering offences, we would like to see them go the extra mile and start rectifying these other areas. As I was saying, there are car bodies lying around the place; there is too much rubbish lying around shopping centres; and the graffiti problem is simply not going away. We hope the government will show a stronger desire and a more fair dinkum approach to rectifying those sorts of problems as well.
We would like to express a concern that there is probably a gap in this amendment bill that the minister is putting up. We would like to see city rangers being required to demonstrate, display and produce ID as well. To that effect, we would like to table an amendment.
Mr Corbell: They do!
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