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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 4310 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

What about the artists who want to display their art legally at one of the designated wall art areas but do not have an adult to purchase the materials for them? Again, I would like to touch on the Belconnen Youth Centre's opening only in the last fortnight, which included a quite amazing aerosol art display. The new signage for the centre is also a piece of aerosol art.

Mr Pratt: We have no objection to that.

MS DUNDAS: Mr Pratt, you were there. I am disappointed to see this kind of legislation produced in response to the positive work being done by the young people in our community.

There are many legal reasons for purchasing spray cans but there are no logical reasons for the exclusion of one sector of the community from purchasing them. The logical extension of Mr Cornwell's amendment is to ban the sale of hoses to everybody under the age of 18, in case they try to make bongs with them. I am waiting for the piece of legislation from Mr Cornwell banning the sale of plastic containers to everybody under the age of 18 because they might use them for an illegal purpose. I am sure that Mr Cornwell does not want to suggest that the sale of motor vehicles to people over the age of 65 should be prohibited because some people over the age of 65 have bad eyesight.

This legislation is a step in the wrong direction. It has also been suggested today that, since New South Wales has introduced legislation such as this, the ACT should do so as well. In some places we are following New South Wales' lead, such as with workers compensation, where it makes sense to have a positive piece of legislation work across the jurisdictions. However, just because one jurisdiction introduces regressive and ill-conceived legislation, that does not mean the ACT has to follow suit. If this is an argument to which the Liberal Party is going to wed itself, then I suggest it looks at what Tasmania has done in relation to same-sex couples. Perhaps we should follow Tasmania's lead in that aspect of legislation.

I will now quote from a paper produced by the aerosol industry itself, which talks about its view on the sale of aerosol cans. It says that one of the issues that it has with the lock-up legislation that has been put in place in relation to graffiti and the sale of aerosol cans is that it appears to be a quick fix solution. It says of those places that have introduced such legislation, "Indeed it is now suggested that they may well have exacerbated and hastened the shift to more destructive forms of tagging such as glass etching and the use of chemical etching compounds."

In London, the London Underground estimates that it will cost over �10 million to replace all the glass that has been etched with graffiti in its trains. It appears that the legislation before us is a knee-jerk reaction that does not really look at the underlying issues. The aerosol industry itself has said that, if you ban the sale of aerosol cans because you want to stop graffiti, glass etching emerges as a problem.

A South Australian report by Halsey and Young from 2002 urged the South Australian government to develop techniques for monitoring the relationship between making spray paint harder to obtain and possible increases in other modes of graffiti written without

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