Page 537 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 18 February 2015
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Mowing is, of course, a constant theme. I have written to the minister, Mr Rattenbury, on a number of occasions in relation to mowing. On other occasions I have been able to refer people to the TAMS website to see when mowing is scheduled for their area. But at one stage the website had not been updated for some months and it was difficult to let residents know when their area might be mowed. And it was a particular problem over the Christmas period. If you drive around Belconnen or walk or take your dog down to the dog park you will see what is happening there. The parks and playgrounds, the median strips and reserves—all the open areas suffer from unkempt grass and choking weeds.
My personal favourite was until recently the state of the median strip on Ginninderra Drive between William Webb and Coulter drives. It is a full masonry median strip on a slope with cement-inserted rocks, but all through the Christmas period and until about 10 days ago it was armpit deep in weeds. About 10 days ago somebody went over it with a whipper snipper and cut it off about three or four inches above the ground. All the weeds are still there and they will come back.
The infestation of weeds in the areas around Ginninderra Drive and Copland Drive is of considerable concern and what we are seeing is that there are now so many weeds that the process of mowing actually spreads the weeds. There has been an infestation of weeds on the median strip in Copland Drive, but the mowers go from that median strip into the Ginninderra Creek corridor and those weeds are now appearing all across the corridor because you mow in one place, you pick up the seed and you transmit it somewhere else. Do that over a couple of years and you get weed infestations elsewhere.
The residents of Crace made it to the front page of the Chronicle over the holidays because of the problem of weeds in their area. Although the residents of Crace have taken it upon themselves to do a great deal, a quick drive around Crace or a walk around Crace will show that there are waist-high weeds all over the place. They are a real problem because there are parts of Crace where houses are not completed and there is uncertainty as to who is responsible. But in the public median strips across Crace, in my electorate, there are waist-high weeds which have been to some extent addressed by the residents themselves.
An area that is a constant problem is John Cleland Crescent in Florey. John Cleland Crescent is a street that runs through the middle of Florey where, except for one small area where there are units, there is no public frontage on the street. It is a continuation of back fences. There were bad plantings made when the suburb was built. The useful life of most of the plants in the area has been well exceeded. Many of them are dead. It is a place which is just a build-up of weeds, rubbish and infestation across people’s backyards onto the public land. As someone said to me the other day, “I suspect the government gets the impression that that is good enough for Florey.” It would not be tolerated in Red Hill or Forrest but perhaps the government thinks that that is good enough for Florey.
This is a constant theme that I hear when I talk to residents. Belconnen residents say that they believe that the standard of maintenance in Belconnen is worse than it is in other parts of Canberra.
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