Speech to Chambers

Speech delivered by Councillor Seal Chong Wah, to full Council Chambers, during General Business on 10th February 2026

I am speaking on the massive rise in missed rubbish bins.

We have seen a drastic increase in missed rubbish bins in the last few years by Council contractors.

The Lord Mayor has been quoted in the news media responding to this issue that, and I quote, “It’s a fundamental responsibility of local government to make sure we deal with waste, and that we give people value for money for services that they’re paying for”

In the 2025-26 financial year, Brisbane City Council ratepayers will pay a total of $512.96 per year for the Universal Waste Charge. 

How can we ask our residents to pay this when we have seen a fundamental failure in our rubbish bin collection service?

Let’s review the data I have obtained of missed bins reported city wide, up until August last year. 

• In 2022-23, there were approx 24,000 missed bin complaints.
• In 2023-24, it rose to over 32,000.
• And in 24-25, in the last available statistics, a whopping 59,000 missed bins. This is an increase of 85% in missed bins in just the last year. 
• In the last 3 years, until August last year, this data suggests an increase in missed bin reports by 150%.

Many residents may not be reporting their missed bins so there may be many more.

‘Veolia’, the contractor was awarded a $900 million, 15-year-long contract to manage waste for Brisbane residents.  Nearly $1 billion dollars.

This data has been trending up over several years. Why has this LNP council not addressed this critical problem 2 years ago? Or at least 1 year ago? 

The Lord Mayor was also reported in news media reports saying ”I am not happy with the performance of the contractor in recent times.”

But at the same time he also defended the missed bins as being less than 1% of all collections.  

If this council allows for a 1% missed bin rate, that would allow for 330,000 missed bins a year and potentially 330,000 more complaints to the council call centre in one year. 

If this is what is written into Veolia’s contract as acceptable, the Lord Mayor needs to find a new job. That is just abysmal management of a core council service.

The Lord Mayor and this LNP council have given no information on why we have seen such massive increases in missed bins of over 150% in 3 years. 

Why is there no transparency on why this is happening?

Is the contractor cutting costs or cutting staff? 

Are the contractor’s staff not happy about conditions? 

In the 3 years between 2022 and 2025, the missed bin complaints from residents in the Paddington Ward have doubled.

My staff are struggling with the amount of additional complaints going through our office.

So I know the Council call centre is also getting a heavy load of complaints.

With nearly 60,000 bins being missed in one year, it’s likely there will be thousands more people complaining about their missed bins.

We saw this LNP council introducing a new policy last week in these chambers to manage abusive customer conduct. 

Obviously, I don’t condone aggressive or abusive communication. Council staff don’t deserve that. 

But if the Council isn’t fixing the problems that residents are frustrated with, of course the Call Centre are likely to have to deal with more angry residents.

Rather than addressing the root problem, this LNP administration is instead, trying to manage a huge influx of frustrated residents by creating a hostile customer complaints policy that threatens to cut off residents completely. 

This LNP council are driving major cuts to council staff, large cuts to council maintenance across the city, of our parks, our public toilets, our footpaths. And now we are seeing our core rubbish collection services failing our residents.