Smith Nick: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Smith Nick: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 15 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4410. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) 
: 
 I want to make just a brief contribution to support the colleagues who have previously spoken on both sides of the House for this Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill. It is a good pragmatic piece of legislation in that the processes that this council is currently required to go through to clean up graffiti makes it impractical too difficult and an additional cost for ratepayers. Effectively what the bill is doing is enabling that to be cleaned up more effectively. 
You could take a very pure private property perspective that says that there is a really high threshold for allowing people to go on to a person’s private land and to add paint or do other work. That is effectively the basis for the pretty strong protections that exist in the current law for council officials going on to property to clean up graffiti. What is so pragmatic and in my view necessary about this bill is that graffiti actually collectively makes our communities worse. We all know that communities that are covered in graffiti get an overall atmosphere of lawlessness that actually drags down communities. That is where I join with others in congratulating the Hutt City Council on the work it has done in this area. 
I also think that by removing the graffiti as quickly as possible you detract from the satisfaction of the vandals of seeing their artwork signature symbol or whatever you want to call it being displayed for longer. It is true that those communities that get rid of the graffiti quickly have less of it and that is a further reason why we should support this bill. My hope as one of those who believes in strong disincentives for those who get some perverse satisfaction from graffiti is that the Hutt City Council might gang up with the police and with the courts with some of those that are caught and actually have them scrubbing off and doing some of the painting to remove the graffiti. I suspect that they will have to do that only a couple of times to realise what elbow-exhausting work it is and will then be a bit more respectful of both public and private property. 
The last point I want to make is that I suspect that this is a bill that if successfully implemented in Hutt City is something that we will want to apply across the rest of the country. Yes this issue of graffiti is a particular issue. There are actually surveys that show that sadly Hutt City is more adversely affected by graffiti than many other communities but actually it is a problem throughout New Zealand. I am hopeful that Hutt City is able to show that this is an effective new tool for councils to be able to quickly remove graffiti and that further down the track Parliament could look at applying this law more broadly. 
It is a good bill. I commend the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee and Trevor Mallard the sponsor of the bill. We should put it into law. We should give the Hutt City Council these powers. Let us see how it goes and be open-minded about extending it nationwide.