Trolley vigilance is key to lawn and order

2022-11-02 - JOE HILDEBRAND

WHEN you grow up a poor boy you’re always a poor boy – no matter how much money you have. And so every week or so I have a habit of driving a few extra kilometres to get the cheapest LPG I can for the mighty Falcon.

The servo I usually go to is in a suburb just like the one I grew up in – big, sprawling, vibrant, multicultural and in many places poor.

It feels like coming home.

But just because it’s poor doesn’t mean it’s not proud.

And this is why there is one thing that really pisses me off every time I go there.

It’s just on the right as I drive down one of the major roads leading into the giant shopping centre that is as much the heart of the place as the old town centre.

A long stretch of nature strip and what appears to be some vacant land adjacent to it are separated by cheap cyclone fencing that doesn’t appear to serve any purpose than to demarcate what I assume is the line between public and private land. Both sides are hopelessly overgrown.

And then on the last corner before the busy turnoff into the bustling mall, amid this messy forest of grass, is a pile of junk adorned by two overturned shopping trolleys.

And the reason it pisses me off is this: That street corner is no untravelled backwater – it’s effectively the gateway to the commercial centre of a major suburb in the heart of the metropolis.

But nobody’s even bothered to cut the grass.

Whether it’s the council or some developer or state government whose job it is, the answer as to who’s responsible is as clear as the grass is long – no one.

And so what’s happened? Someone who’s had to wheel their shopping home in a trolley – presumably because they can’t afford a car – has figured they’ll just dump it in the grass.

After all, it’s clear that no one gives a rats about what’s left there.

And sure enough someone else has been wheeling their trolley along and seen the last one left there and figured this was obviously the place where people dump their trolleys and they’ve dumped theirs there too.

After all, that’s what happens in shopping centre carparks right around the country.

And soon enough other detritus gathers around and the next thing you know you’ve got a rubbish tip right at the entry point to a thriving community and bustling business centre – a centre that has a Myer, incidentally, because the residents are aspirational and take pride in looking good.

And it’s all because some lazy developer or bureaucratic buck-passer couldn’t be arsed mowing the lawn.

This is, right here in Australia – and probably somewhere in a suburb near you – an example of “broken windows theory”, first coined in the 1980s to explain the infamous degeneration and urban decay of major US cities at the time.

In a nutshell, the theory holds that if a window is broken in a building and is left unrepaired then soon all the other windows will be broken.

As the originators of the term explained in an article for The Atlantic in 1982:

“Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers, whereas others are populated by window-lovers. Rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

The flipside – or perhaps final deduction – of the theory was most famously put into practice by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and his “zero tolerance” approach to crime: Just as if you intervene to save one window, you save the whole building, if you arrest people for petty crimes, you’ll prevent them from committing greater ones.

While the merits of treating fare evaders as potential murderers can be argued on the grounds of natural justice, there is no doubt that when it came to driving down crime the policy worked.

In 1998, Giuliani and his police chief announced that in just five years crime in New York was down by almost 50 per cent, and homicides were down by a staggering 69.3 per cent.

Now it appears that New South Wales is channelling New York City, with the state government empowering councils to triple the fine for the dumping of shopping trolleys to $660 for individuals and slugging businesses $1320 if they fail to collect them.

No doubt other states will be watching closely to see if it works.

Now I’m not sure if people whose only means of grocery transportation is a shopping trolley are the best cash cows for government, but just as the physical act of smiling actually improves your mood, you can bet that physically improving the appearance of our suburbs will boost people’s pride in them.

In the meantime, I want to know how much they are going to fine councils and businesses who don’t get off their arse and mow the grass.

It’s The Day Of The Dead in Mexico, when the lives of loved ones who’ve died are remembered and celebrated in full technicolour glory. We are also encouraged to take steps to honour the sacrifices we’ve made, and be inspired by other people’s achievements as the Sun becomes the focal point of a tense dynamic between Mars and Neptune. It’s time to remember past, important relationships, and to look forwards, motivated to live up to the ideal of the person we’d like to be.

ARIES MAR 21 – APR 20

Be careful what you say and who you say it to. Even when people look as if they’re uninterested, they’re listening. I’m not trying to make you feel paranoid, it’s just that irritatingly, when we want people to listen they don’t pay us enough attention, yet they listen closely to the things we’d prefer them not to know. In today’s potent cosmic climate, you’re attracting more attention than you realise, and you’re being taken more seriously than you think. Be delicate, discreet and subtle, as befits a person of great power.