Green bins

An update to the ongoing saga with the gardens in our rented town house:

I've previously mentioned our real estate agent sending us a confrontational email about being in "breach of contract" because the gardens were not up to spec. Well recently we received a much more civil email asking us to attend to some creeper vines taking over the front garden. We've just renewed our lease for another 12 months, at a 4% rent increase, and were assured that the weed situation would be taken care of by a contractor because the weeds were present before we moved in. Two quotes from independent contractors later, nothing happens, and I get an email asking me to attend to it...

What we thought were some nice little bushes have since proved themselves to be be poplar trees by growing from only a few feet to over 1 story high. Meanwhile, the creeper vines do their part to try and overtake the garden by continually overgrowing and if left unchecked inevitably covering everything. This is the second time I've had to spend a day getting rid of them.

Rather than making a big deal of it, I reported that I have removed the vines, and asked if when a contractor does finally come to attend to the poplar trees they could dispose of them. The reply simply asked if I can just use our green bin. To explain, each of the 30 or so town houses in this strata have a tiny wheely bin for general rubbish which is collected daily, and those with gardens are supposed to have an additional green bin which can be used for garden waste, but only once a month or something. The closest thing to a green bin present at the property when we moved in looked like this:




The agent was aware of this, having received the very same photo via email and then coming to inspect the situation in person after we moved in over a year ago. Nothing has been done since, but rather than a pile of crap in one corner of the garden I'm fairly sure that we should have been provided with a functional green bin. Actually, there shouldn't have been any noxious weeds in the garden in the first place, and if there are it is certainly not the tenants responsibility to dispose of them...

Well fuck it, we're thinking about buying something soon, but we'd have to think twice before buying from this agent.

Conroy wants $43 BILLION dollars to build his own damn broadband network then...

In his relentless pursuit of Australian internet censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed that the federal government let him build his own fourty three billion dollar broadband network, undoubtably with filtering built in. Our 3 main ISPs, Telstra, Optus, and IInet have refused to participate, so he thinks he'll just roll out his own... the man is clearly insane.

Listen Conroy: we don't need faster internet connections, we need more bandwidth!!! We also don't want or need a mandatory internet filter.