Page 2265 - Week 06 - Thursday, 6 June 2019
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suburbs is essential for Canberrans to be able to enjoy our beautiful open space safely. Our community should be proud of this city. When the amenity of our open space is impacted by littering or dumping, the value that our community places on our surroundings is reduced, and this can have flow-on impacts on local residents and the broader community. Similarly, littering on private property can have serious impacts on property owners and the surrounding community, from someone throwing food packaging into someone else’s yard to keeping large amounts of rubbish on a private block.
The bill I am presenting today will address the key issues that Canberrans have raised about littering and improve the overall livability of the territory in three key ways. It will work to protect the environment and the amenity of the territory through an effective compliance and enforcement framework that allows the legislation to be easily enforced where a person chooses to ignore the rules and litter in our beautiful city.
The bill will establish a new escalating framework for littering offences where the penalties are proportionate to the amount and the type of litter dumped. This means that someone dumping a small bag of household rubbish will receive a different penalty to someone dumping a carload or a truckload of rubbish. This is considered best practice and is an important deterrence mechanism which is already taking place in other Australian jurisdictions. This escalating framework is accompanied by a new fine framework which complements the escalation model and enables officers on the ground to take effective action.
The bill recognises that a number of littering offences take place in, near or around a vehicle and ensures that fines can be issued for littering offences where a vehicle is involved. Currently an infringement notice cannot be issued where a person is seen littering from their car or dumps a large amount of rubbish and gets into their car and drives off. I am pleased that the bill rectifies this issue, which will dramatically improve enforcement capabilities and sends a message to offenders that polluting our suburbs with litter will not be tolerated and that effective investigative and compliance action can and will be taken. The change will be further supported by increased use of CCTV footage around the territory and a new dedicated compliance team that will target littering and illegal dumping as well as enforcing other laws.
This bill will further protect the amenity of Canberra into the future by allowing for regulations to be developed to support dockless bikes, scooters and other modes of shared transport in the ACT when the need arises, which will be similar to the current shopping trolley framework in the existing act. This recognises that dumping of these items has both amenity and environmental impacts on our city, and that the suppliers of these items have a role to play in keeping the city clean from dumping.
I am pleased that this bill protects the environment and the amenity of our suburbs by ensuring that littering and dumping can be policed effectively not only in our public spaces but also in open private places such as building sites and schools and also in recycling drop-off centres. We have seen an increasing number of cases where building materials have ended up in our environment and our waterways, particularly in our new suburbs that are under construction, and where some people are dumping rubbish in recycling drop-off centres and at schools. This is not acceptable.
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