Page 1797 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 May 2005
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and their people are proud of what they have got. I suggest they are a damn sight prouder than we are in the ACT. I find this embarrassing situation untenable. The ball rests squarely at the feet of the Stanhope government.
Graffiti vandalism is consistently spread across the town. Nothing is sacred any longer. I believe that even the war memorial, that greatly adored national icon, has now been attacked. Our national assets have become collateral damage because the Stanhope government is too weak to tackle graffiti in its own jurisdiction. The Chief Minster and his Minister for Urban Services should hang their heads in shame.
Let me give one example of the scope of this problem. From the southernmost regions of Athllon Drive well south into the Tuggeranong Valley and from there into the Canberra city centre we see dozens and dozens of the graffiti tag “Axiom”. This destructive person Axiom, whoever he is, has splashed his tag over everything imaginable: power, utility and post office boxes in the centre of the Tuggeranong Valley; colorbond fences along upper Athllon Drive in the vicinity of Torrens and Pearce; bridges across Adelaide Avenue and public and private buildings in the city. Commuters who take that route into the city daily assure me that Axiom has been hard at it for about two years.
How can a serial graffitist vandalise the whole community for years and evade arrest? If he has been arrested, why has he continued with the same tag? The answer can only be that the Stanhope government does not care to arrest even serial graffiti offenders. If they do, they do not have the heart or the willpower to strike the fear of God into these people who vandalise property across the ACT. Even when these tags are not directly on a particular building, there is sure to be graffiti in the vicinity of the building, making the whole area look rundown and uninviting.
Someone who spends a fortune installing a new colorbond fence becomes a target of irresponsible vandals who brazenly spray their tags up and down the street. These vandals know they can get away with it because the Stanhope government is not doing enough to deter these criminals. As a consequence innocent residents suffer not only the destruction of private property, but also the enormous cost of having it cleaned up.
To continue to paint the picture—pardon the pun—just about any shopping centre in the ACT is affected by this problem. By way of example, the Ainslie shops, the topic of recent publicity, is one of many urban shopping centres continually covered in the stuff. It has suffered this problem for years, with little sign of improvement. We have recently also seen the widespread publicity in the media about how business owners and visiting tourists to the city are fed up and disgusted at the graffiti vandalism that plagues just about every building and alleyway. It has been said by many that the extent of this problem makes this place look something akin to a Third World country. Even the Chamber of Commerce has said:
We have been hearing from businesses for about a year that graffiti is an issue and that the Government has refused to remove it from privately owned sites, and has become slower in removing it from government owned sites.
The cost of graffiti removal to the community is enormous, not only the direct financial cost, which I will go into in a moment, but also the loss of trade for business owners in areas covered in graffiti. The area then looks rundown and uninviting, turning potential
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