Territory Housing has many responsibilities. Amongst them is the responsibility - rather basic - of providing you with a safe, healthy, secure home for you and your family. They did not do that for us. Previous tenants had strewn the place liberally with glass and apparently twice they'd (Housing) had the place cleaned of glass. Twice was apparently enough for them, they wouldn't do any more. When we found glass in the place, strewing the ground, a danger to our children (and ourselves and visitors, come to that) they wouldn't do anything to fix it. They've really tried to pull a swifty, they've even tried to deny that we ever asked them. Carefully expunged or never made any records of our asking. Claim it never happened. But all that's covered elsewhere. There's other things: How about the fence? Our fence was never dogproof. There was a hole through the fence and under the fence. Not that it mattered. The dog next door could jump over it any time it wished. Now that fence should have been fixed. Those people next door ( A Housing house ) should not have been allowed to maintain that dog in that way. Don't think there's just the one dog. The neighbours would sometimes have as many as five dogs running around the place, came with visitors, along with drunken noise and fighting and abuse and hostility. Also wandering stray dogs would want to get into the neighbour's place because of the dogs there. Well all of that is not right, is completely wrong and is Housing's job to fix. Then there's the gate. It was, from the beginning, without a drop bolt. i.e. it wouldn't close and stay closed. We asked for one, they ignored us. An open gate, in a house with toddlers. Then there's the gum trees. There were rotten gums in one corner of the garden, threatening at any time to fall. They could have fallen on my children. Then there was the rotten ground. In the same corner as the rotten gums there was a rotting stump. The stump hadn't rotted much but the big roots beneath the ground had - rotted mainly because of being eaten by white ants. This caused the ground to collapse beneath your feet suddenly when you walked over it. So that the ground was now like a moonscape and pitted with ruts and holes - a danger for a child to walk on and a nesting place for snakes, rats and whatever. Housing should have fixed that. |