Susie O’Brien: Why councils talking rubbish won’t fix our bins

When sanctimonious councils who spend their time pandering to specialist minority groups can’t even manage bin collections, it’s time to move.

Woke lefty councils are putting up signs for non-romantics, advertising for climate change artists and letting cyclists take over city streets.

But they can’t even manage basic services such as bin collections.

The Herald Sun revealed on Tuesday that Mornington Peninsula Shire residents who put rubbish in the recycling will be fined up to $600 and banned from recycling for three months.

And they will have to keep paying their $327 waste levy for a service they aren’t even receiving.

Even worse, they’ll have to undergo “education sessions” about how to recycle properly.

When sanctimonious, preachy councils like this think it’s their role to educate the rest of us, then it’s time to move.

Never before have councils – who used to occupy themselves with providing basic services like rubbish collection and stray dogs – taken such an interventionist activist role in teaching the rest of us how to live our lives.

If they spent a bit less time pandering to specialist minority groups, then they might get the major issues right – like bin collection services.

If they set up simple, workable systems, then they’d find a much higher rate of recycling compliance.

We want councils to stop obsessing about issues that don’t matter and pick our rubbish up.

But when councils take away people’s rubbish bins, or downsize their bins and switch pick-ups from weekly to fortnightly regardless of the size of the household, they force residents to break the rules in order to dispose of stinking, unhygienic rubbish.

At a time when recycling rates by councils are at an all-time low due to the difficulty of securing overseas or local recycling facilities, it’s absurd of them to be punishing rate payers for doing the wrong thing.

People in many areas are getting four bins to make things easier for the council – but all the sorting makes it harder for residents who are stuck if their waste doesn’t fit in the bins.

It doesn’t help that some things that used to be recycled are now rubbish, and that the rules differ between areas.

Or that some councils are creating the problem of bins that don’t meet our needs then making us come up with solutions such as Yarra’s patronising “getting to know your neighbours” initiative.

We don’t want to be educated or preached to by our council.

We don’t want council officers to be taking photos of our bins and putting us in the naughty corner for breaking the rules.

We don’t want strangers peering into our bins to make sure our cardboard is folded correctly.

We want guidelines that are workable and flexible and cater to the needs of all sizes of families.

And we want councils to stop obsessing about issues that don’t matter and pick our rubbish up.

Nothing more, nothing less.

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