Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I represent a very congested electorate. It's geographically small, about 44 square kilometres, and it's shrunk in the time I've represented it. When I first became the member for Sydney it was over 60 square kilometres. The reason the electorate has continued to reduce in size is because it's grown up. We're a much more densely populated electorate than we were 20 years ago. That's brought particular problems. It's meant that as a community we've had to really focus on urban amenity, making sure we have the health and education services, the public transport, the parks and recreation and good urban design principles that make it pleasant to live with our neighbours.

One of the things that has been troubling me and my constituents lately is the extraordinary selfishness of people who take shopping trolleys from shopping centres and just dump them. They dump them in our urban waterways, dump them in our canals and streams, dump them in our parks and dump them on our footpaths. Of course, councils across Australia have taken steps to prevent this happening. Some councils mandate that supermarkets have to have the coin deposit or the automatic wheel-locking technology, and they fine supermarkets that don't collect trolleys quickly enough. All of this adds to the cost of groceries—someone has to pay for that new technology or for the retrieval of the shopping trolleys.

On top of the ugliness, the inconvenience, the obstacle course that people are leaving for their neighbours, when they leave their shopping trolleys on the footpaths they're adding to the grocery costs of every single other shopper as well. It is beyond me. I understand that in a seat like mine a lot of people like to walk home from the shops. I encourage them to walk home from the shops. You can get one of those little pull-along shopping trolleys, that my mum had 40 years ago, for 20 bucks. You can buy them off eBay very cheaply, indeed, and I would be delighted if more shopping centres made them more easily available to customers so that people can pack their things in shopping trolleys and pull them home.

Local government must make sure that they are working with shopping centres to prevent the dumping of shopping trolleys. But, more than that, people have to be good neighbours. For goodness sake, I urge the people who are habitually taking trolleys from shopping centres and dumping them on the streets to think twice. Think about your neighbours—struggling wheelchairs, pushing prams on the footpath. Think about the urban environment. Think about the costs you're adding to the cost of other people's shops. Have some consideration for your neighbours. It's only by having that sort of consideration that we can live in harmony in our densely populated cities.

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