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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Tuesday, 3 August 2004) . . Page.. 3315 ..

difference is not clear from the way this bill is written. We hear from the government that they do not treat tagging in the same way as street art, and hopefully those statements will be noted by the people who have to implement this law. But this lack of detail is definitely a shortcoming in this piece of legislation.

Mr Wood says that he does not agree with the diverting proposal that I always put, that people who are taggers can move to being street artists. I have given Mr Wood and his officers evidence that the most successful graffiti campaign to reduce the amount of graffiti—

Mr Wood: We are doing the same thing here.

MS TUCKER: Not to the extent that they do in Warringah. In no way is it supported in the way it is in Warringah. I would ask the minister to have another look—

Mr Wood: Have you been there to see how all the tagging is still around?

MS TUCKER: They got a local government award for their project. The evaluation is really interesting. The tagging decreased, the clean-up costs decreased, the community environment improved, the relationship between young people and police improved and the relationship between young people and the community generally improved as they became involved in civil action, if you like, on the committee that was managing the graffiti issue.

There was a clean-up in Warringah and I am not suggesting there was not. But I think it is important to respond to the minister’s comments that he does not really think that my support for the possible diversion of taggers into graffiti artists is being supported by evidence, because it absolutely is.

Mr Wood: We paid attention to you.

MS TUCKER: Mr Wood said he paid attention. I do not think we have seen the effort that we need to see. We need to see really much better art projects where the materials are provided in the youth centres.

Mr Wood: We’ve done that. We did that, yes.

MS TUCKER: Okay. Mr Wood said he has done that. I am interested to hear that.

Mr Wood: We had an open day. I must get you a briefing on it.

MR SPEAKER: Order! This is a debate, not a conversation.

MS TUCKER: The question I have then is over what period of time do you think this will make a difference? The evaluation that occurred in Warringah was not after a month or two. I am really interested in seeing how we can improve how we are supporting young people. It is really easy to make it a black and white argument, as I have heard some people do.

Mr Cornwell: That’s part of the problem—black on white.

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