Page 4364 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 1993
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It required extensive consultation with the relevant unions, because obviously there is an industrial issue if people against whom community service orders have been made are doing work that, in the ordinary course of events, would be done by government workers. But the problem was becoming an acknowledged problem. Canberra is not the graffiti capital of Australia, as Mr Humphries said in one of his more sensational utterances to the press on a quiet Sunday a year or so ago; but we were having a problem in Canberra with racist graffiti.
I acknowledge the cooperation of the union movement in the ACT Government Service in saying, "Yes, we are happy to have community service order offenders working to remove graffiti". We launched that a week or so ago at Dickson, when a group of community service offenders scrubbed down the Dickson bus interchange, which had been fairly heavily vandalised. We still have a few problems to sort out. One of these people happily appeared on television, having removed his shoes and socks because it was a warm day, scrubbing down the walls, which gave our occupational health and safety people a fairly nasty job. We are going to have to focus much better on getting occupational health and safety protection for these people out there doing community service work.
We are expending resources to get rid of this nasty and unpleasant graffiti in Canberra, and that is a cost. We do not have unlimited resources; everybody knows that. A good idea is one thing. To trial something like this on a small scale, as I indicated publicly at the awarding of this year's ACTION bus-shelter prizes that we will do next year, is one thing. Requiring us, the Government, to create a coordination unit on this sort of scale across Canberra with a timetable is simply an inappropriate requirement for this Government to use its resources on, and one that the Government will not be supporting. But if the Assembly passes this motion we will do exactly what the Assembly requires.
MR HUMPHRIES (11.21): Madam Speaker, the Government has made some capital out of the apparent cost entailed in Ms Szuty's motion. I have circulated amendments which in a moment I will seek leave to put before the Assembly formally. It is very easy for us to confuse public art and vandalism. Anybody in this place who is concerned about the character of Canberra - - -
Mr Berry: It is very easy to discern.
MR HUMPHRIES: Your colleague Mr Connolly has just made it very clear that there is a fine line between those two things, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish between acceptable use of public spaces and unacceptable use of public spaces. So Mr Berry should pay a bit more attention to what his colleagues are saying.
Madam Speaker, we know that there is a very important obligation on us to do everything we can to prevent the widespread graffitiing and the widespread vandalism of our community by people whose intention is no more and no less than to create a nuisance and to spoil public places for their own enjoyment and for their own gratification. Madam Speaker, the Assembly would do well to bear in mind the need to reduce this kind of vandalism, as I would call it, or unacceptable expression of a point of view, as others might call it.
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