Page 4363 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 1993
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environmental message. Is that political? Maybe you would say, "No, that is acceptable". But there are bus-shelters featuring themes such as "Let us not enlarge the hole in the ozone layer". Mr Stevenson, is the claim that there is a hole in the ozone layer a political statement? You have been known to come into this chamber - - -
Mr Stevenson: It certainly is.
MR CONNOLLY: Indeed. That is my point exactly. One person's proposition of a community theme is another person's political statement. So our censorship panel that we build up on top of our vetting panel on top of our network of field workers and coordinators is all going to have significant cost. I am going to have to find those people from somewhere within the Department of Urban Services.
Mr Westende has been pursuing me with some vigour, arguing that perhaps we do not have enough resources in the Supply and Tender Agency. We have one person there going flat out, and there are other resources available. Do I say, "I bow to the wishes of the Assembly"? Obviously, if the Assembly passes this motion, we will do this. Do we take the person away from the Supply and Tender Agency and say, "Sorry, Mrs Community, but we have been required to set up a graffiti art coordination unit"? Would those resources go from there? Resources do not come from nowhere. It is naive to say at the very end of a speech with two extensions, "This will not involve resources". This will involve resources. This will involve significant resources, and that is why the Government is opposing the creation of a central coordination unit to do all of this with the consultation and the whole process and the timetable built into this motion.
That is not to say that I am unsympathetic or that the Government is unsympathetic to channelling graffiti art into productive means. We do it through the ACTION competition. It has been working extremely well. I have already indicated to Ms Szuty that I would be happy in the early part of next year to trial a couple of additional facilities on a very small scale. We will go a little bit beyond ACTION; we will find a couple of facilities and we will see how this thing works. You can do that without any significant budgetary impact. I am happy to do that, but I oppose the concept of the Assembly mandating us to establish this central coordination unit. It is a poor use of resources.
Madam Speaker, again towards the end of Ms Szuty's remarks she acknowledged that there is some graffiti that is anti-social. Madam Speaker, there is a lot of it. There is a lot of nasty, racist, violent graffiti popping up around Canberra. It costs us a lot of money to get rid of that nasty, racist, violent graffiti; and I do not think that the nasty, racist, violent graffiti writers, if given a wall, are suddenly going to turn into suburban Picassos. That graffiti is a very unpleasant form of stirring community violence. I think that everyone in the Assembly would have seen the sort of inter-ethnic group nasty racism that I am referring to.
We recently embarked on some significant initiatives that I would like the Assembly to be aware of to deal with that aspect of the graffiti problem, and again they involve resources. This is us using our resources in a smarter way to deal with the problem. Persons who are the subject of community service orders, whether they be adult offenders or juvenile offenders, are working out their community service orders by removing that sort of nasty racist graffiti from Canberra's public facilities. That took some time for us to put in place.
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