Landscaping With Trevor

Now you might think that after spending over four years as Speaker of the House, Mallard might have some experience for dealing with unruly crowds. but his recent run-ins with the new local camping ground that has sprung up outside the beehive has shown us that maybe he should leave crowd control to the professionals.

Hi there. When you find a few extra minutes in your weekend to pay attention to your lawn, do you find yourself stonewalled by a village of hippies, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers setting up shop? That’s okay, surprisingly you’re not alone with this awfully specific problem. Amateur landscaper and Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard, has recently had this issue and has provided us with real world examples of what you should and shouldn’t do. Cheers Trevor.

Automated Sprinklers

Having a sprinkler system in your garden is a neat mod-con and useful in the parts of the country that don’t already rain at least once a day. Sprinklers are used primarily in the summer months when Watercare specifically tells you not to use them because they weren’t expecting the dams to be full of nothing but oxygen.
As a pesticide, however, sprinklers are less than ideal, and if used against the garden variety tradie will result in you requiring to hire that same tradie to come back in a few weeks and fix the bloody thing.

Music

The use of music blasting at a crowd of people to disperse them might seem like something that would make sense to someone who’s long since associated the word “party” with the two groups of people that yell at each other on opposite sides of the room all day. Trevor’s spotify playlist of ‘Tunes to Disassemble To’ includes the Macarena, Baby Shark, Frozen’s Let It Go, and tracks from James Blunt, who selflessly volunteered his music as being annoying enough to drive people away from the Capital.

A Strongly Worded Letter

By golly, protestors are really going to get it now, there’s nothing you can do against some strongly written notes promising that more are going to follow if they aren’t careful. This signals the extreme ends of how far Mallard is willing to go. When delivering passive aggressive warnings to people, be sure you aren’t giving it to a group that is specifically there because they don’t want to do what you tell them.

The Cops

For most backyard work, it’s good to get an extra pair of hands in to give you a, well, a hand, I guess. For most jobs, a good mate or Hire A Hubby will have you sorted, but for really big jobs, like clearing some land, Mallard recommends the police. At the time of writing, police have arrested 122 people who mostly went back to what they were doing after being released on bail. The police have since reverted back to their old tactic of keeping the peace and waiting for protestors to die of old age.

A Cyclone

Weather events are always good for a fresh start. Mallard, second only to God, The Queen, The Governor-General, and the Prime Minister (in that order), obviously has the power to manifest storms. Usually he uses the power to maintain Wellington’s reputation as the world’s largest wind tunnel, but when you have an infestation on your lawn, maybe the tail end of a cyclone will help. If you have the option, I’d avoid using cyclones for anything, too much collateral damage which pisses off the neighbours. More reasonable measures include leaf blowers, however using these against tents generally alerts the occupants to your motives, resulting in the confiscation of the blower.

As unyet tried tactics that we might see being employed in the coming days (or your past), could range from putting up “No standing on the grass” signs or laying down slug pellets. That is if the council doesn’t intercede when protestors call noise control at 10pm on the dot every night till he stops the annoying music.