Page 2106 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2018
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than Ms Lee. Ms Lee talked about the leaf litter of Canberra’s exotic deciduous trees, mainly in the inner city and older suburbs. This runs straight into our waterways and lakes where the sudden burst of organic nutrients triggers massive algal blooms. These algal blooms, especially the dangerous blue-green algae, for a very long time rendered our waterways unswimmable and had an adverse impact on native ecosystems that relied on those waterways. I thank Ms Lee for noting that. Environmental activists, scientists and the Greens have spent decades trying to convince governments around this country of the need to protect our waterways from more than just litter. We do not just need gross pollutant traps.
Twenty years ago in 1998 environmental activists in Canberra led a campaign to clean up Sullivans Creek. That campaign snowballed into saving our waterways and the lakes all across Canberra. In 2012 the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment delivered their Lake Burley Griffin investigation report which detailed a huge number of improvements the ACT government and surrounding jurisdictions could and should take to restore our water ecosystems.
Here in the Legislative Assembly the Greens have advocated for better environmental and municipal practices to improve water quality, culminating in a major item in the 2012 parliamentary agreement to restore the health of Canberra’s lakes and catchments, including through the expansion of our suburban wetlands scheme. These essential wetlands continue to be rolled out across our city, and I welcome yesterday’s announcement of funding for another wetland in Molonglo Valley. I am very pleased that about 500 metres away from me in Mawson a wetland is being built for the purpose of improving the water quality in the Murrumbidgee River.
The upshot of this is street sweeping is important to preventing algal blooms, but it is part of a much bigger strategy to improve our water ecosystems. Street sweeping is a very visible part of our city services program, much like lawn mowing. I seem to remember a very similar motion from the Canberra Liberals this time last year about that. But street sweeping is only one part of the wider city services program with a limited budget and a lot of competing priorities. That is why I was quite surprised by Ms Lee’s motion calling on minimum time frames for responding to fix my street sweeping requests. Generally, I am in favour, of course, of time frames and prompt action in responding to constituent concerns, and there are accountability indicators in the budget on response rates. A binding time frame creates a whole bunch of practical problems.
Leaves largely fall in autumn—most of them in May. The current prioritisation process discussed by Minister Fitzharris aims to sweep every street in Canberra twice a year and five times a year in suburbs with a high proportion of deciduous trees. A binding time frame has two possible outcomes: either it becomes a race to see who can lodge their fix my street request first as soon as autumn hits or TCCS basically drops everything and spends each day in May sweeping streets. That might not even work because I do not know if they will have enough machinery to sweep all the streets in May at the first instance when people put something on fix my street.
Another and I think better approach would be to improve the visibility of the sweeping schedule with an interactive map, like the one the government made for lawn mowing and garbage collection. That having been said, I am not anti-innovation.
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