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Don't you hate it when you do everything right to mindfully assess and separate your household waste and fill your recycling bin properly only to see your rubbish neighbours wheel out a yellow-lidded bin laden with plastic bags and overflowing with other stupid junk that will contaminate your household's conscientiously-sorted recyclables?
More power, then, to the City of Ballarat which will employ new staff to inspect the contents of household bins as part of the Victorian city's move to eliminate glass from its yellow-lidded residential recycling bins.
The Courier reports that Ballarat's team of "Recycling Bin Inspectors" will be permitted to "have a look inside the top of the bins that have been put out for collection".
Householders with offending waste will receive "a discreet note to say give us a bell if you want any help in relation to what goes in the recycling bin".
To my mind that seems a bit polite but, sure, it's a step towards a proper bureaucratic framework for the Neighbourhood Bin Shaming Act that shall pass into law when I come to power.
Do you reckon the Australian government will be given a "discreet note" by the United Nations this week?
Leaders from 64 nations, the European Union, more than a dozen companies and banks, a few cities and a state will present their plans for a cleaner planet at the UN secretary-general's Climate Action Summit.
Aussie tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes plans to show up to show off his company's commitment to reduce emissions: a target of zero net emissions by 2050 across Atlassian's operations and supply chains, and fully powered by renewable energy by 2025.
Cannon-Brookes will be in New York for the UN gathering - unlike Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is sending Foreign Minister Marise Payne.
Yes, apparently even UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is fronting up. But not the Aussie PM.
As Ebony Bennett, deputy director at independent think-tank The Australia Institute, has commented, while Parliament House in Canberra will soon be powered by 100 per cent renewable electricity, Australia's government is powered by - and pardon my paraphrasing here - fossils.
To many Australians, fresh from their global Climate Strike action on Friday, it's not a good look for Mr Morrison to be skipping the UN - especially after spending the past few days hanging out with the only world leader to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
But Canberra Times columnist Ian Warden, in pondering the mysteries of the modern moral compass, is taking some cautious comfort in the suspicion that deep, deep down our PM, as a conservative Christian, "must find Trump's debauched, porn-stained personality repugnant".
So, as he schmoozed with President Tweet in recent days, Ian reckons ScoMo "stoically hid his sincere pentecostal shudders".
As only "a great gentleman" would.
James Joyce
Executive Editor, Australian Community Media
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