Page 1798 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 May 2005
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customers and much needed tourists away. This is something that has not to date been fiscally measured, but theoretically it would have a significant financial impact on business turnover.
If we analyse the costs that have been measured, we see that the Stanhope government has spent about $3.5 million in the last three and a half years on graffiti removal. This figure, however, does not include the costs incurred by private property owners to have this mess remove. It is estimated that graffiti removal is costing business tens of thousands of dollars and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove. Now the Treasurer is going to impose a levy on business owners to cover the cost of graffiti and general rubbish removal.
But there is no guarantee that this money will be used for such a purpose and no guarantee that it will actually have any impact on the problem. It does not necessarily mean that the Stanhope government will ensure that graffiti is cleaned up more extensively or that it will reimburse business owners for the cost of graffiti removal, which it is not doing currently. It just seems to me to be another excuse to raise revenue and punish business owners for the problem instead of punishing the real offenders. To add to the burden, residential property owners are also slugged with the cost of graffiti removal from their own fences and brick walls. This is an unacceptable burden.
The number of incidents of reported graffiti in the last three and a half years has exceeded 50,000. If we break this down into yearly figures, there does not seem to have been that much of a drop in numbers in the years since the Stanhope government came to office. There has been an appreciable drop but, given the very high level of that activity in the first place, there has not been any measurable inroads into this problem. In 2001-02, there were 15,292 reports; 16,000 the next year; 13,000 the year after and, in the last six months, 5,200 reports of graffiti to the ACT government. I got those figures from answers to questions on notice.
I strongly suspect that even more reports could have been made in recent years. It would not surprise me if many Canberrans have given up reporting many of these graffiti attacks as the amount of graffiti at present around the place never seems to decline and nothing ever really seems to be done to address the problem. So why bother? People simply could not be bothered to report something that will probably never be fixed by this government anyway. So if the number of reported incidents do, in fact, decline by the end of 2004-05, it will probably be simply because people have stopped reporting them.
Let us look at arrests. If we look at the actual number of arrests or penalties issued to graffiti vandals in the last few years, we see that the Stanhope government certainly is not serious about deterrence. It is unbelievable that, of the 50,000-plus incidents reported to the Stanhope government over those years that I mentioned, there has been a total of 77 arrests—and not all arrests either. That figure includes cautions, summonses or diversionary orders issued. That is pathetic! That is less than a 0.2 percent success rate by this government in actually dealing with offenders. This indicates to me and to the community at large that this government is not serious about tackling this type of crime. The problem is that the majority of perpetrators escape punishment because they are not caught. If they are caught, they are not given appropriate severe penalties. The arrest rate is pathetic.
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