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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 4308 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

like that can still go ahead. Obviously, a program like that is something we could do here. We have had programs here that were run under supervision in a more controlled environment. I can recall one done through a youth centre during the time that we were the government. There is nothing to stop something like that happening now.

Maybe some of the under 18-year-olds who are currently getting spray cans, causing some mayhem and annoying people in the neighbourhood with bad graffiti, could, if they cannot get spray cans as readily, go to some supervised activity and engage in some decent form of art as a result of that. They might get their jollies that way and feel quite comfortable with that, and not have the same urge to spray graffiti around the neighbourhood and annoy honest, ordinary, average citizens in the neighbourhood who do get very concerned about it.

One other suggestion I would make to the government is graffiti squads. I do not know if Urban Services still have something like that, but I can recall that, in 1995, the urban services minister, Tony De Domenico, introduced graffiti squads who would hit an area that had been graffitied very, very quickly. That would often have a very good effect, because one thing graffiti makers do not seem to like is having the graffiti cleaned up immediately. It tends to slow them down, they get the hint and perhaps move on. Again, it is not going to stop everyone, but we found that approach reduced the problem too.

There are a number of things this government could do which it is not doing. It could have some more programs that control the use of spray cans and make graffiti into an art form because, on this matter, the one thing about which I agree with the Chief Minister is that, if you do have a work of graffiti art, you do not tend to get tags on it. That is something we can build on.

At the end of the day, you can have all the programs in the world, all these well-meaning attempts to look at root causes or to encourage people to do things in a more civilised manner, but it ain't going to work all the time. Life is not like that. At the other end of the scale, you also need strong laws that make it very difficult for people to go ahead and break the law. That is exactly what Mr Cornwell has done here with his particular piece of legislation.

Unlike the government, which had to bring in an amendment yesterday for a strict liability offence because it had imposed a term of imprisonment for what was a relatively minor offence, Mr Cornwell does not do that and his legislation imposes a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units or $1,000. That is eminently appropriate for something such as this. He then has a defence in his subsection 384A (6).

The Chief Minister might not like it and the Chief Minister might be going into all sorts of legal contortions to say that there is something wrong with it-I reiterate my offer to the Chief Minister: if you do not like it, bung in the New South Wales defence or the South Australian one, because Mr Cornwell is not going to mind-but I think perhaps the Chief Minister might be being a little insulting to those wonderful people in the Parliamentary Counsel's Office, who are very careful with what they draft. As I said earlier, Mr Cornwell wanted this to be as close as possible to the New South Wales legislation and that is what they have done. It seems to me to be a reasonable defence to a prosecution to have what he has here, which is that the employer had no knowledge of the sale and could not, by the exercise of appropriate diligence, have prevented the sale.

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