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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (26 March) . . Page.. 620 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

to stress the danger to the public of this sort of behaviour. Strangers to this town need to be able to read the traffic signs, first of all, to know what the speed limits are and, secondly, to know where they are and where they are going. Some of those signs have been so badly overpainted that they are indecipherable. There is one in Wanniassa that I saw the other night. It is a caution sign when you come to a T-junction, and somebody has painted over it "Speedway". The original intent of the sign is completely hidden because you cannot see it.

The committee took this matter seriously. I believe that the committee did accept that there are underlying reasons why people spray things. Some of them, there is no doubt, are just plain vandals, but most of them probably are not. For a case of vandalism, if you drive up Yamba Drive from the big roundabout towards the Woden Valley Hospital, you will see that every street lamp standard on the left-hand side has been sprayed all over. There is nothing decipherable, just spray paint. Somebody obviously went along there with a couple of spray-cans and sprayed all over it. I do not regard that as street art; I do not accept it even as tagging, which I think you could argue there is some legitimacy about if people want to make known the fact that they are there: "This is me; here is my tag". This was neither of those things; it was just outright vandalism, and there is a certain amount of that. That, I think, the community is entitled to deal with harshly. In the main, I believe that we should be making provision for those people who genuinely regard themselves as street artists. We should try to provide some space where they can practise their art. The rest we should discourage.

Generally speaking, these are productive, positive recommendations, and I would urge the Government to act upon them fairly quickly. One of those recommendations is that the Government report to us on the operation of its graffiti clean-up squad, which has been in place now for some time. There are some places around the city where you can see the results of their work. There are others where there appears not to have been anything done yet, and some of them are in quite prominent places. I recognise that their resources are probably fairly slim and that they are dealing with things in some order of priority that they have determined; but I think it would be useful to have the Government give us a report on what that squad has been doing and where they have concentrated their efforts so far, and some estimate, in the judgment of the squad itself, as to how far they think they have gone in getting rid of some of the less desirable vandal-type graffiti that is so obvious around the place. Mr Speaker, along with other members of the committee, I commend this report to the Assembly and to the Government and look forward to some prompt action.

MS HORODNY (12.05): I was particularly pleased with certain of the recommendations in this report, and I will focus on three or four of those. Whilst I do not take away from the personal responsibility of people who are committing the offence of spraying and vandalising certain areas, I recognise that, as we all heard in the committee, there are wider social considerations in this issue. They have to do with youths and other members of the community feeling disempowered and disenchanted and not having an avenue to express what they feel.

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