Council messed up by taking bin
We live in a busy restaurant strip frequented by numerous visitors including many from overseas.
About 12 months ago, Hobsons Bay Council removed the street bin at the corner of Thompson Street and Nelson Place, next to our premises.
Since its removal, our street corner has been a mess and a safety hazard.
The council refuses to replace the bin, claiming that non-street rubbish used to be put in it as well as street rubbish.
Our response was to suggest that it install a small, power pole-mounted bin as it had in the past before it put a large one at the street corner. But no.
Rubbish continues to build up and the council can’t clear it as quickly as would be accomplished by having a bin.
We have spoken to the EPA, which is running a campaign to keep streets free of rubbish in the interest of avoiding harm to bay wildlife and to beachgoers. It is sympathetic but, so far, that’s all.
Glass and plastic bottles, metal cans, filled nappies, drinking glasses and all sorts of other things get into our gutters and then enter the stormwater system, leading to the bay. Glass items which don’t immediately enter the drains, break, causing foot injuries and threatening vehicle tyres.
Hobsons Bay Council, this is not good enough. We want our street corner to be as tidy and safe as anywhere else. We also care about the bay.
Joan and Ian Thomas, Williamstown
Rising crime rate is inevitable
Re. Maribyrnong crime rate ‘too high’, police admit (Weekly, March 6): Population growth will inevitably mean more crime and social disease. Instead of a unified, stable society, resources are continually being stretched and shared with more people. Interestingly, the federal election campaign is focusing on western Sydney, with all the woes of big growth, crime, the great benefits of multiculturalism, and the problems of poverty and congestion.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd at an urban development conference last week in Melbourne endorsed a “big Australia”. These growth-ists assume they can create a feudal-like society of people as resources, as workers and economic units, to make them wealthier — and be ignored until election time when the costs of growth compound and need billions spent to ease the problem.
Tony B
Incompetent government imploding
Re. SKY High hopes dashed as Dixon rules out any chance of new school (Weekly, March 6):
Chin up! You won’t be dealing with this incompetent mob for much longer.
They’re just about to implode. Geoff Shaw resigned and Ted Baillieu was ‘knifed’.
kingzog
Trees axed just for the view
Last week when I picked up my daughter from school at Westbourne Grammar in Williamstown, she asked me if I had seen the trees and the signs.
At first I thought she was referring to the trees damaged by vandals in The Strand and then I realised she was talking about the trees that had suffered the same fate inside the school grounds.
I tried to explain this senseless act in terms my eight-year-old would understand.
But, really, how could I explain that this was most likely caused by some nearby resident who wanted to improve a view.
So they chopped down the trees that had provided shade and a place for young minds to imagine, play and dream.
E Virtue, Newport
