Page 2109 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2018
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As I hope many of you are aware, Lake Tuggeranong has one of the most significant problems with blue green algae of all of our lakes in the ACT. So we all need to do that we can. But in those town square areas, or whatever you want to call them, it is not the residents who are going to go out and sweep it up. It is a local council, or ACT government, responsibility to ensure those areas are swept clean. I have talked about the leaves. Sadly, there are also other things that are left there—litter and all sorts of other things as well. That is why we pay our rates; it is to see these things done.
Mr Parton: Increasing rates.
MS LAWDER: Increasingly, we pay our rates in increasing amounts. This government spends a lot of money encouraging constituents by advertising not to put things down the drain. That is a good thing. It is a very positive thing. But people are not necessarily putting leaves down the drain. We need to take action on that as a government to ensure that the leaves are not going down the drain.
About two weeks ago the minister went on Tim Shaw’s 2CC breakfast show. He talked about the spend in the forthcoming budget. As we all know, the good news was all announced prior to the budget yesterday. What we got in yesterday’s budget was mostly the bad news about the increases in fees and charges. But, when asked by Tim Shaw on the radio about TCCS using leaf blowers on windy days, the minister laughed it off. She thought it was a bit funny. She said, “They have a job to do and they have to work with whatever challenges they face.”
That is true, but someone in my family is a gardener. They do a lot of leaf blowing as well. They carry around a backpack driven leaf blower because they move around to different sites. It is not an electric plug-in thing. They know that it is next to useless blowing leaves on a windy day. They blow back in your face. In fact, it is almost pointless blowing leaves when someone is mowing on the ride-on mower next to you, because that creates a little breeze of its own.
It is a bit of a wasted effort. It is not a matter of ticking off that the leaves at Tuggeranong town square have been blown today. If you go back an hour later, all those leaves actually will still be there because the wind has blown them back. It is not a case of working no matter what. I thought the minister displayed a bit of a dismissive attitude to the obvious concerns about whether this portfolio area could be working a bit better.
There does not seem to be flexibility allowed in the minister’s directorate. That comes down to poor planning and poor direction from this minister. It is clear that if problems like this are a joke to the minister, she is out of touch with what Canberrans really want. Staff in Transport Canberra and City Services should not be made to blow leaves on a windy day. It is pointless. It is a tick-the-box issue. It is not actually achieving the outcomes that we expect from the government. It is a bit like something in Fawlty Towers.
Nearly five years ago I made my inaugural speech here in this chamber. In that speech I spoke about the need to get the basics right. I talked about roads, rates, rubbish and parking—the three Rs and a P; not that kind of “P”. Unfortunately, in the past five
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