Pathetic, bureaucratic rubbish

Back in March, I was going through Auburn when I spotted some posters that had been put up illegally on roadside power poles.  After doing a bit of web browsing when I got home, I found that the posters belonged to the Nature Conservation Council.  The NCC received $1.3 million in grants and sponsorship in 2007/2008, and although a breakdown of that income is not readily available, it's clear that around 80% of it's funding comes from the taxpayer, presumably funneled through the Department of Environment and Climate Change.

The problem with posters is that when they eventually fall down, they either blow up and down the street as rubbish, or they clog storm water drains, or they get washed down storm water drains into our creeks, rivers and harbours.  Putting up posters is a form of littering, and I did not think it appropriate that an organisation devoted to environment causes should be littering!  It's as bad as them dumping their unsorted rubbish in a park, or in the harbour.  

It's even worse when that organisation is funded by the taxpayer.  The taxpayer gets stung twice - once to pay for the posters, and a second time to clean up the mess afterwards.  To me, that's a shocking form of waste and abuse of taxpayer's funds.

I emailed Irene Simms, the Mayor of Auburn, and got the following response straight away:

Thanks for your email. I agree about the eyesore that bill posting presents, but my information is that we must catch the culprits in the act of bill posting.

We cannot assume (although to me there are only 2 likely sources, the venue or the 'act' ) that the venue is responsible for the bill posting.

I would be happy to discuss further as this is a pet grievance of mine.

So it seems pretty clear from that email that Auburn Council are less than impressed, and would prosecute the perpetrators if they caught them in the act.

I then wrote to the Minister for the Environment and Climate Change:

Dear Minister

 

I have attached a photo of one of a number of posters that have been put up illegally around the entry ramps to the Western Motorway at Silverwater Road.  The posters direct the reader to http://www.saveourlastsharks.org.au/, which then redirects to the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.

The NCC’s annual report notes that up to 85% of its funding comes from state government grants – and most, if not all of those grants presumably come from your department. 

Under the NSW Protection of the Environment Operations Act, bill posting is considered an illegal form of pollution. Councils can issue fines directly to the venue responsible for producing the poster. 

I request that you write to the NCC and instruct them to immediately cease illegal bill posting, and to remove any posters that have been put up to date.  I am amazed that an environmental group like this would indulge in polluting the environment in this manner, and that taxpayer funds would be used to erect illegal, polluting material.   

This is a disgrace, and it warrants immediate investigation.  At the very least, all grants to the NCC should be suspended until they have made good the damage that they have caused, and further taxpayer funds should not be used to effect a cleanup.  I am going to write to the council responsible for this area and request that the NCC be prosecuted for these activities, and once again, taxpayer funds should not be used to pay any fines that may be levied against the NCC or its officers.

I had to chase up Carmel Tebbutt's office twice over a 3 month period before I finally got a response, which I have posted below:

What a load of rubbish!  And note that they refer to the NCC's "alleged" bill posting.  If the NCC didn't put them up, then who did?  A group of shark-hating maniacs who were trying to discredit the NCC?

Essentially, they are trying to get off the hook by insinuating that Auburn Council might permit this sort of activity.  Well, Auburn Council don't, and the Mayor tells me that they have been handing out fines of late and are cracking down on the practice. If they had bothered to check with Auburn Council before writing me this letter, they could have found that out for themselves. 

I've asked the Mayor to write to the Department (or the Minister) to explain the position of Auburn Council, and to tell them to cease and desist!

In short, the Department of the Environment and Climate Change is going to take no action against the NCC for littering.  The rivers of taxpayer funded grants will continue to flow uninterrupted, and no one will be punished.  So much for the Minister for the Environment actually caring for the environment!

The pain of using contractors

NSW Maritime got a run in the paper today over a poorly placed sign in Balmain.  Their excuse - contractors installed it.

I don't blame the contractor.  I blame a poorly drafted statement of work, or unclear work instructions, or poor management by whoever engaged the contractor.  

A contractor will only do what they are told or paid to do.  In most cases, they are not being employed to think, and they may have only the barest idea of departmental or company policies and standards.

I have seen a few examples of badly performed graffiti removal lately, and I think it is all down to badly briefed contractors.  RailCorp eventually painted over graffiti on a bridge in Leichhardt, but the painter failed to paint over about 25% of the visible graffiti.  I presume what they missed was not in their statement of work.

Energy Australia employs contractors to paint over graffiti on their substations, which they generally do quite well, but they never tell them to remove the graffiti from signage on those substations.  You often end up with a nice, freshly painted wall with graffiti-enhanced signage plastered all over it.  The point is to remove all the graffiti - 100% of it - not just the graffiti on the brickwork.

Quick off the mark

I have to give full credit to Energy Australia this week for being quick off the mark at cleaning a kiosk that I reported on Monday. By Thursday, the graffiti was gone - that's a very rapid response for a utility (and it wasn't even offensive graffiti).

However, I do still wish that they would encourage their own staff to report graffiti, rather than relying on members of the public. They get an A+ for fast removal and an F for internal reporting.

Conversation with two vandals

Actually, it was not a conversation at all. I eavesdropped on a pair of them whilst riding the bus through a succession of inner western suburbs. From the snippets that I picked up, both were at TAFE, and they had a good idea of which vandals had tagged or sprayed various walls and buildings between Camperdown and Leichhardt.

I was pleased to see that they also puzzled over the provenance of a tag on a bus shelter, trying to work out what the illegible scrawl was supposed to mean. They couldn't work it out, so their final decision on the matter was, "that shit is fucking gay".

To steal some lines from "Batman":

Alfred Pennyworth: When I was in Burma, a long time ago, my friends and I were working for the local Government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders, bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being
raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. We were asked to take care of the problem, so we started looking for the stones. But after six months, we couldn't find anyone who had traded with him. One day I found a child playing with a ruby as big as a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing the stones away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred Pennyworth: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

They laughed and hooted and hollered as the bus travelled down the road and they spied tags on this structure or that. One delivery truck that was covered in tags was especially well regarded, as in, "Somebody really fucked that shit up".

They delighted in destruction. They really appeared to just want to watch the world burn.
Their conversation was about 50% "fuck", as in every second word was a variation on "fuck". Those passengers around me simply pushed their iPod earphones more tightly into their ears and tried to ignore it. I tried hard to look like I was not listening in.

Both looked like late teenagers, and one had what appeared to be a large, red catfish tattoo covering one forearm. They were dressed in what I would call "expensive, chic, urban slackerwear". Fashionable footwear, chunky silver chain, brand name hoodies and shorts. They did not strike me as struggling in any meaningful way, yet I wondered how they were managing to work their way through a TAFE course. They did not strike me as the studious type.

Until seeing these two on the bus, I had always had a sneaking suspicion that a certain number of vandals must get around by bus - how else would one explain the repeated tagging of bus shelters and nearby signage and structures? This just confirmed it.

Listening to them was an instructive exercise - the opportunity to observe them in a completely uninhibited environment. They were not putting on a front, and there was no one there to protect them or mitigate their behaviour (ie, as in sitting with a solicitor in a Police interview room). I got to see them raw and unedited and unfiltered.

It strikes me that when people like this are pulled up for their crimes, they know all too well how to play the game - the way to act, the things to say, the means of gaining sympathy. If social workers and judges and politicians could see them in their natural environment, they might have a different view of their motives, personalities and characters.

Taking out the trash

Hang around the waterfront long enough, and you might get to see one of these NSW Maritime boats cruising past on its way to pick up a load of rubbish from the rubbish traps at the end of the canals that empty into the harbour.

This canal runs under the City West Link and empties into the harbour at Haberfield.  I walk through the park that runs along the canal on a regular basis, and the amount of floating debris in the canal has to be seen to be believed.  If it wasn't for these traps, you'd be able to walk across the harbour on the rubbish that washes down from further upstream.

This is the second time I've seen this being done, but I didn't manage to get any photos first time around.  The first time I saw a trap being emptied, it was full to the brim.  You can get a good idea of how big the traps are by comparing this one to the deckhands.  I don't know if NSW Maritime goes through the garbage and analyses it, but to me, it appears to be about 90% plastic bottles.

Movement at the station

It's only three short weeks ago that a fairly good bit of work appeared at this site on the approaches to the Gladesville Bridge.  Alas, now it is gone, covered by a slab of black paint. Even worse, whoever painted over it failed to get rid of the ridiculously bad bits of "artwork" next to it.  If they had to paint over something, why couldn't they have eliminated the scribbles and kept the art?

Unless we can expect something new and exciting to appear here soon? 

I don't know whether this is a legal site or not, but I've seen a bloke working on it in broad daylight as I've driven past.  Either it is legal, or it's being done by the most brazen artists in the hood.

Unfurling a new flag

Our local Police station was proudly flying a fresh, new flag today.  It appears my occasional grumbling has paid off, even if it did take some months to get a result.  I got a kick out of seeing a flag that was not tattered, faded and unloved flying at full mast.

I was going past the station around sunset, so I stopped and stuck my head in.  When the Constable on duty asked me how he could help me, I pointed out that it was sunset and it was time to lower the flag.

He asked me to repeat myself, which I did.

I think he was quite stunned to see that a member of the public would bother to walk into the station to tell them that.

He replied that he was aware of the protocol, and said that they couldn't always take it down - presumably due to resourcing problems and other more pressing matters blah blah blah.  I don't mind it not being taken down from time to time, but I'm not going to stand for it not being taken down for months on end.  I guess I will just have to front up at the station every day at sunset and repeat my mantra - the flag will be lowered at sunset.  After a few visits, they should get the point.

Murals

Are murals a way to keep idle hands and evil minds occupied?

I've been to Bondi and seen the "murals" along the waterfront.  Some are reasonable to look at, but most display a serious lack of artistic talent.  The problem most of these "artists" have is that no one has ever told them that they are no good; that they are failures when it comes to daubing paint on a surface.

I'm a fan of old fashioned murals, like the one here (scroll down to the third photo).  It is well executed, and it has meaning to a wide range of people.  

And it's legal, which is a big help.

I was scrolling through some old posts tonight and came across a photo of the Post Office in Concord that I took back in January showing graffiti on the front wall.

I never bothered to report that to Australia Post - until today.

Australia Post staff have been walking in and out of that Post Office for nearly 6 months since I took that photo, and none of them appear to have bothered to notice or report the graffiti.

So much for civic pride, and pride in their organisation.

They really don't care

Over the last month, I've reported about a dozen vandalised kiosks (those green substations that lurk in suburban backstreets) to Energy Australia.  Energy Australia are generally quite good at arranging to have them cleaned - within a week or two, most are back to being boringly dull green.

My constant complaint is that Energy Australia has staff driving around all day in Energy Australia vehicles, and a reasonable percentage of these staff must drive past vandalised kiosks and substations.  I have even had a chat with one bloke who parked next to one to do his paperwork.  My impression is that as far as these mobile Energy Australia staff are concerned, vandalism of Energy Australia assets is not their concern.  It is somebody else's problem. Someone in another department or division, possibly in another building.  Definitely someone that they never come in contact with during their working hours.

Just to drive this point home, I photographed this Energy Australia truck recently in Canada Bay.  It appears to be parked at the home of an EA employee.  Assuming this employee works out of the Homebush depot, they have to drive past at least 3 regularly vandalised kiosks to get to work, and the same 3 on the way home.  How many instances of vandalism do you think they have reported over the last year?

I can safely say "zero", since the only time those kiosks get cleaned is when I report them.

Why is it so hard to encourage staff to notice and report this kind of stuff?  Do they have any pride in the organisation that employs them?

New kid on the block

We welcome a new name to the NOTSEP pantheon of vandals, delinquents and taggers.  This one goes by the tag of "rotor", along with a number of variants on that.

When I first spotted the tag the week before last, I spent 15 minutes walking around a few streets to see if I could discern a pattern - and here are the tags that I found, plotted thanks to Google Maps.  The tag on the far right is near the skate ramp in Five Dock Park.  On the far left, we have the Five Dock shopping centre.  It looks to me like rotor has done a lap between those two sites - a trip from 'food' to 'fun'.

Rotor left his tag on a number of publicly owned assets, including those owned by the Council, Australia Post and Energy Australia.  

The map above should help explain why I have been so keen to get all utilities to report vandalism to the Police - if all graffiti incidents end up in a centralised database that has a mapping capability, you can start to discern patterns in the behaviour of particular vandals.  

In this instance, I am pretty sure that until recently, the only spots on the above map would have been those at Council owned sites, because only Council was collecting information on vandalism and reporting it.  Without a full information picture, you'd never be able to spot a pattern of behaviour.  The only reason I can show you where I think rotor walked (or rode his skateboard) is because I took the time to walk around and have a look for his trail.

Collecting information is crucial, and so is collecting a full set of information.

Update

I haven't posted much of late because I haven't anything new to say.  I could post the same boring, repetitive posts about reporting this and cleaning that, but I don't see any point.  For instance, over the last two weeks, I've reported 5 vandalised Energy Australia kiosks, 3 vandalised post boxes and 3 vandalised RTA traffic light cabinets.  There's nothing new in that - it's just a matter of keeping an eye on these sorts of assets as I drive or walk around each week.

One thing that doesn't change is the behaviour of the grubs who choose to dine along the foreshore at Wymston Parade in Wareemba.  The lovely view across the water is always spoiled by grubs who can't be bothered walking 15 feet to put their cigarette packets, coffee cups, fast foods containers and drink bottles in the bin.

The rubbish on the road is dropped there from cars.  A car pulls up, the driver and passenger gorge themselves, then the open their doors and drop the litter on the road.  No effort is made to walk to the bin clearly visible in this photo.  As I said - grubs.

Talent?

In my opinion, 99.99% of what comes out of the end of a spray can is worthless, horrible rubbish.  That includes pieces like the three pink and purple creations on this wall.  However, I have to admit that whoever did the recent piece on the far left does have some talent.  It's not bad.  

If it's not their legally, too bad.  It will have to go.

The fig leaf of "acting commercially"

I received the letter below from Penny Sharpe MLC, Parliamentary Secretary for Transport:

When I wrote to our local member, I did not ask that either State Transit of private bus companies spend any money on cleaning bus shelters and bus seats - that makes paragraph 4 a waste of space.  Furthermore, the company I am working for presently has hundreds of outlets around Australia, and some of them get graffiti on them from time to time. The company is utterly ruthless about having it removed immediately - first thing before they open their doors - because they understand it is bad for their corporate image.  I don't see how "acting commercially" can ever be an excuse for failing to remove graffiti.  

I will be interested to see how paragraph 5 works out - the request for State Transit to institute a policy requiring drivers to report bus shelter graffiti.  Will the bus unions play ball?  I doubt it.  

My response is going to be along these lines:

We have a Labor MP in our electorate - Angela D'Amore, and one next door in Balmain - Verity Firth.  Now let's imagine it has come election time, and Verity visits our electorate and notices that someone has been busy drawing Pancho Villa moustaches on every poster of Angela, and writing rude words about the Labor Party.  Will Verity:

A) - do nothing, as it is not her electorate, and therefore not her problem

B) - ring Angela and tell her she has a problem, and that the defacement of her posters is a problem for all Labor candidates as it "contaminates the brand", making them all look bad

C) - try and clean the graffiti off, or failing that, remove the vandalised posters and arrange for replacements to be sent out

I wonder if Penny Sharpe will see the parallels between this and the situation facing Sydney Buses?  Sydney Buses are not responsible for the bus shelters, but a smashed up, defaced bus shelter makes them look bad.  Do they:

A) - do nothing (which is what they do now)

B) - report it

C) - do something about it

I'm not asking for "C".  I'm simply asking for "B".  It will cost them almost nothing - not even a phone call, since most councils have a web based logging system for this sort of thing.

Landlords......

What is it about some landlords? I've dealt with some that are obsessive about the state of their property, going over it with a fine tooth comb at each inspection and immediately engaging tradesmen to fix faults. I even had one that noticed termites as he was walking by one day, and we had a pest controller on our doorstep the day after.

Then there are those that couldn't give a damn. I've heard about two in our area - one owning a residential property and the other a commercial one. Both have become tagging magnets in their respective areas.

Council have cleaned the residential property once, and provided quotes to clean it again when tags reappeared, but the landlord is refusing to come to the party. Knowing what rents are like in our area, and having a rough idea of the cost to remove the graffiti, I estimate that it would cost less than 1/4 of one week's rent to clean up the property, but they are too stingy to cough up even that.

The commercial property is even more bizarre. The tenant, who I have mentioned here before, offered to spend over $10,000 of their own money on applying a graffiti-resistant coating on the outside surfaces. The landlord delayed and procrastinated over giving permission, and when he finally did give approval, he did so on the proviso that the coating be removed at the end of the lease!!!

Madness! The tenant decided that since their lease does not have that long to run, they won't bother with it. I guess they will be moving to cleaner pastures when the lease runs out, and in this market and in that location, they will have a very tough time finding a replacement. You won't find me weeping over that landlord suffering from their own stupidity.

In other news, I wrote to the Director General of the Attorney General's Department this week and submitted my views on how I think the members of their Anti Graffiti Action Team (AGAT) are going. I gave some utilities an A, and recommended that they kick Telstra off for being utterly useless. I've asked for that report to be tabled at the next meeting of AGAT. If they won't release their minutes of meetings to me so that I can see what they are doing, then I'll let them know how I think they are going. Some of them might not like what I have to say, but I can only go on the information that I have to hand - ie, what I see around me.

I also wrote to the RTA, asking whether they report all graffiti on their assets to the Police. Somehow, I doubt that they are at present. When I wrote to the Minister for Energy about Energy Australia, they responded by saying that they would do so from now on - I'm hoping the RTA will take the same tack.

It's been a quiet week for reporting things - the bad weather has been keeping the vandals inside, but it hasn't been bad enough for pot holes to start appearing in roads or for trees and power lines to come down.

What the hell?

I was driving over the Gladesville Bridge last week and I spotted a bloke with a roller painting over a mural on a wall at the approach to the bridge.  The old mural went up late last year, covering a large number of tags.  I was never sure whether that was the act of a couple of brazen "artists", or a legal bit of work.  Well, the old mural has gone, and this has replaced it.

I was never a big fan of that mural, but it was certainly better than this.  

The rest of that stretch of Victoria Road looks like this - tags everywhere.  I think that all the properties that back onto Victoria Road are rentals (no owner would want to live there because of the noise), and I guess the landlords just couldn't give a damn.

Telstra amazes with their turnaround time

I reported a badly vandalised public phone booth to Telstra on Wednesday morning. I drove past it yesterday morning - and it was clean! Amazing - less than 24 hours to remove offensive graffiti. I feel silly for taking 18 days to report it. I won't be so slack next time.

I will give Telstra a qualified thumbs up. It's great that they responded so quickly - now, if they could just get around to cleaning up their vandalised exchange buildings....

A meeting I actually enjoyed

Like many people, I often don't enjoy meetings. It doesn't matter whether the meeting is held in a nice cafe or on a sunny beach - if it is boring, badly run and clearly going nowhere, it's a total waste of my time.

That's not how our first meeting of the Canada Bay CSPC graffiti group went yesterday. We had a good introductory talk, throwing lots of ideas and issues around and then paying a visit to a nearby site. I got a strong feeling that this is not a "fig leaf" group - that is, where you hold meetings to put a fig leaf over a problem, and then do nothing about it. There are no "talkers" in the group - everyone is a "doer".

There's no quick fixes in this game - I'm digging in and preparing for a long slog. We've identified some opportunities, and we've also identified plenty of problems that need to be worked through. It's entirely unglamorous and unspectacular work, yet I can't see how building co-operation between residents, the Police and the Council won't pay off in the long run.

The other nice thing about the meeting is that we are a small group - we can all fit in one car at the moment, which means none of the trauma of running a large gathering.

You know, I am actually looking forward to the next meeting! I must be going mad.

Reporting graffiti to Telstra

I finally got around to reporting graffiti on a phone booth today that I first spotted on 2 May. Even though Telstra staff or a contractor have probably visited that phone during that time to empty out the cash, I doubt anyone has bothered to report it.

A timeline for you:

11:18:30 - Rang 13 22 03 and listened to some interminable messages. Chose option 3.

11:19:00 - spoke to an operator, found that I had gone through to the wrong department. Put on hold.

11:20:40 - operator found the department that I needed to speak to, put me through.

11:21:40 - finally got to where I needed to be, gave them the details. I couldn't give them the phone number as it was unreadable under the spray paint.

11:23:00 - call complete.

Four and a half minutes - not bad. It's taken me 20 minutes in the past to get through to Australia Post, which is why I now only log problems via their web site. I'm still surprised that Telstra only allow you to log faults over the phone. Given that they are also a huge internet company, it seems odd that they don't give you a web based option. I'm sure I could log a problem via the web in less than 4 1/2 minutes, which would make me more likely to get around to reporting it sooner, rather than 18 days later.

Who would vandalise the Salvo's?

I passed a banner this morning promoting the Salvo's appeal this weekend. Some idiots had scrawled three tags on it.

What sort of low life attack the property of an organisation dedicated to helping the less fortunate? Some people really are the lowest of the low.