It could be from a satire: Boroondara Council in Melbourne has banned 20/20 cricket from many of its grounds after a “risk assessment”, prompted by a broken car window.
Not two day and 50 over matches; just 20 overs a side. One can only presume the survey found that the number of sixes hit per 20/20 game was unacceptably high, but the number hit during other forms of the game was not.
This is exactly the kind of Kafkaesque bullshit, promulgated by public service oxygen thieves that citizens need to vigorously oppose.
I shudder at the thought of the scientific shoddiness of the “risk assessment” procedure used, as well as the useless jobsworth who conducted it and the idiot local councilors who voted in favour of the ban (if a vote was even required).
There are balls hit over the boundary in all forms of the game. Fingo even hit a big six last weekend (followed by a catch to deep mid on).
A simpler way to mange council liability is to require all clubs to have appropriate public liability insurance, which all registered clubs have anyway. The insurance companies will work out the premium from the estimated number and severity of claims. This is how it’s always worked in the past, with no meaningful problems, so the council can just get on with its real job: mowing the outfield and preparing the pitch.
Instead, we have someone who probably knows nothing about cricket making an unreviewed and ignorant decision to ban only certain forms of the game, thus affecting a large number of people playing a traditional Australian sport.
Another possibility is that this decision is the first step in a secret agenda to remove the cricket pitches from these parks permanently so the council does not have to incur the expense of maintaining them.
The people who make decisions like this are worse than merely lazy. They don’t just eat up wages, doing nothing useful: they actively ruin the amenity of citizens. They hide behind anonymity and bogus “regulations”, made up by themselves for their own protection.
The way to deal with them is public exposure. This is what they most fear.
The cricketers affected should identify the council employee who has made this recommendation and the local councilors who have made the decision and distribute their contact details to all affected parties. Make sure they are acutely aware of your opinion of them and whether they should continue in their positions.
Let the councilors know that a vigorous campaign will be conducted against their reelection.
It is not enough for people to merely be angry but take no action. Look at the UK, with its jungle of ridiculous regulations, stifling an enormous number of what sane citizens see as reasonable civic freedoms. The same thing is starting to happen here. If we don’t want this trend to continue, we must have the types of people who make these decisions removed from any positions of influence and dismantle the self perpetuating structures they have put in place to ensure their survival.
These are not people who can be reasoned with, because they would not listen even if they could understand the counter argument. They are a cancer, consuming public funds and destroying public amenity, inventing idiotic rules and procedures in a failed attempt to justify the unjustifiable: their own existence. If they are not weeded out of all positions of any authority, they will continue to destroy our quality of life and freedom to enjoy ourselves with their inane regulations.
Update:
If we do end up with a referendum on recognising local government in the constitution, do not vote Yes, unless you want to greatly increase the power of local councils and hence have much more of these bullshit decisions.
The proponents of the Yes vote will mostly be Greens, local governments and their supporters. They will tell you recognition will have no unintended increase in local government powers, but they will be either deluded or lying. It only takes one activist judge.
No comments:
Post a Comment