Bradford Sue: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — Second Reading 
Bradford Sue: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10275] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 Although the Green Party was on the Local Government and Environment Committee which dealt with the bill and I did attend the hearing of submissions I take this opportunity to reconfirm our original position of opposition to this bill which is the same conclusion that the select committee itself has reached. I am now astonished to find that the Labour Party is supporting the bill and I have been very interested in the debate and comments about why Labour now supports this essentially flawed legislation. 
The issue is not that the Green Party does not have great sympathy for the position that Manukau City finds itself in. Mayor Sir Barry Curtis councillors and staff reported to us at the hearings last year that graffiti vandalism in their city has increased by an estimated 500 percent over the last 5 years. At the time of their submission staff were removing tags from 1500 sites a month roughly—up from 300 sites 5 years earlier. The council gave us an estimate that a tagger with just one $3 can of spray-paint can cause up to $7000 worth of damage. The council reported that it has 30 people out every day painting out graffiti and that it spends close to $1 million a year on that yet still it feels that it is not keeping up with the blight on the landscape. 
Businesses and residents throughout Manukau City are understandably totally fed up with the situation they find themselves in and are desperate for solutions. Thus they came to Parliament with this bill which they saw as a way to control graffiti in their city through a number of discrete measures. Those measures include regulating the display and sale of spray-paint creating new graffiti offences empowering the local authority to go on to private property to remove graffiti and providing additional powers to the police where they suspect a graffiti-related offence has been committed. 
However although all those measures may sound fine on the surface there is an underlying problem with a local bill of this nature in that it attempts to amend the criminal law in one territorial local authority area when our criminal law actually applies on a national basis. We do not have a federal system like that in Australia or the United States where it would be technically and legally a lot more feasible to create criminal laws that are applicable or specific to a particular locality. The Green Party agrees with the select committee’s observation that in a country like ours with a unitary legal framework it would be a mistake to amend or modify the criminal law on a localised or piecemeal basis. 
We also note that because of the local nature of this bill passing it could also lead to unfortunate and almost certainly unintended consequences such as people moving over the borders into neighbouring areas to carry out their tagging activities—just intensifying the problem in the cities beside Manukau—and obliging taggers to use substances other than spray-paint because of the tighter regulations on the sale of spray-paint in that city only. Of course people could go over the borders of Manukau City to buy or steal spray-paint anyway. 
A second area of concern the Green Party has with regard to this bill arises from the way that it infringes upon the rights of children and young people. For example it proposes to stop the sale of spray-paint in Manukau City to people under the age of 18. In fact the people who spray graffiti may be of any age at all. In addition limiting sales in that way also discriminates on the grounds of age without there being any particular reason why 18 should be used as the cut-off point. As the Children’s Commissioner told the select committee she considers that the bill is “antagonistic toward children and young people and further contributing to negative stereotyping of youth in Aotearoa New Zealand.” 
The Green Party also shares the anxiety of a number of submitters about the extension of police powers contained in this bill and about the fact that it is inconsistent with at least two separate areas of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. 
On a more positive note I acknowledge the comments made by the select committee about the various alternatives that local bodies around New Zealand have put in place to deal with graffiti vandalism. They include things like youth and community initiatives to beautify cities including initiatives within Manukau itself and the work done by the Christchurch City Council through its accessible reporting systems and its legal art programme now called Project Legit through which taggers—in some cases referred by the courts or by youth justice officials—are encouraged to use their artistic propensities in useful and legal ways. Mr Goff has also mentioned the initiatives now happening across Auckland to get local bodies working together on the graffiti problem as well as working more closely with the police and other relevant organisations. Those are all good things. 
The Green Party believes that further solutions and assistance are needed to help local bodies to deal with the graffiti issue but that such solutions should not cut across the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or continue to demonise children and young people. We believe that solutions should come after genuine consultation with children and young people particularly in the districts most affected by graffiti crime. Both the Government and local councils need to do more to implement programmes that address the reasons behind the graffiti epidemic—for example through doing a lot more to provide activities that both challenge and entertain young people in culturally and socially appropriate ways. Heavy-handed legislation and increased police powers will only increase alienation and anger amongst young people who are already in many cases disenfranchised bored and cut off from the society whose buildings fences and walls they feel impelled to deface. 
The Green Party supports the enforcement of existing legislation. We support increased Government and local government funding for appropriate activities for children and young people as well as ongoing consultation with them to find solutions to the graffiti problem. However we do not support this bill despite the very real problems it attempts to address. We need to take a fresh approach to graffiti that understands the realities of taggers’ lives that learns from successful overseas and local initiatives and that takes a national overview.