Page 534 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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deliberately put it under the wrong heading in order to get a complaint lodged because there was no suitable heading.
When you go onto fix my street to say what you want to report, if you type in “littering” it brings up a whole series of options. Cycle and footpaths? No, the dumping of this muffler and exhaust on this reserve was not about cycling and footpaths. Parks and public spaces? Possibly, but the next options on the drop-down list include “parks and public spaces: barbecues and picnic areas”. No, it was not a barbecue and picnic area. “Parks and public spaces: fencing and bollards”: no, that was not the issue. “Parks and public spaces: playgrounds”: no, that was not the issue either.
In working through this list it seemed impossible for a number of residents to find the correct place to report this littering, whereas under the previous system you could just go to your topic, which was “littering”, rather than having a place-based approach. Several residents reported to me over a period of about a month that they gave up and thought, “Someone else can work it out and deal with it.” Eventually, someone else did work it out, wrote to the minister and it was picked up. We have made this unnecessarily difficult. People did not want to deliberately put it under the wrong heading, so they chose to leave it and for it to be someone else’s problem. This is not an attitude that we want to encourage.
The other problem that is often reported to me relates to the amount of time it can take for reports of litter to be picked up. In fact, we know from a number of places, including the 2018-19 estimates hearings, that littering and illegal dumping was the single largest topic of request through the fix my street form, closely followed by abandoned vehicles, which is quite a similar topic.
The issue for most Canberra residents is that it can take, on average, 6¼ days for a response to take place in regard to littering and illegal dumping and, in the worst case, the maximum is 163.89 days. Residents simply do not want to wait for that long. We have spoken in this place before of the fact that people feel they are paying more in their rates, taxes, fees and charges and that they are getting less. When they drive around our otherwise beautiful city, they do not expect to see rubbish.
Another of my constituents, Richard, who complains frequently to me about dumping and littering, gets incensed when he drives to work each day down Long Gully Road. From the top of the hill between Tuggeranong and Woden and before you get down towards the turn-off to the tip, seems to be a really popular place to dump large items. People obviously are not taking them to the tip. There were lots of tyres, chairs and quite large pieces of rubbish dumped into a gully just off the road there. It is not visible from the road as such, but the fact that people are doing this and that when it is reported it can take such a long time to be cleaned up is of concern to most Canberrans.
We should make the reporting of littering easier for residents—that is, the current reporting process for residents, as is referred to in (2)(c) of Mr Milligan’s motion—and we should make sure that city rangers have enough resources to fix up littering in our city. We will look forward to the minister’s response on that.
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