Wagner Nicky: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wagner Nicky: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5391. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
NICKY WAGNER (National—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I am absolutely delighted to support this Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill at its third reading. I was interested that Trevor Mallard said that it is a simple bill and he is absolutely right. It is simple it is good it is sensible and it is straightforward. I think it is a credit to the Hutt City Council for bringing it to Parliament. We did not have to do much work on it at all just a few slight amendments and a few tweaks. 
The Local Government and Environment Committee worked well on the bill. It was actually interesting because a lot of these issues of graffiti are things that we come across in our own cities. Really what this bill is all about as Trevor Mallard has explained is giving the Hutt City Council the ability to enter private land to remove graffiti from buildings that are in the public view—not around the back but in the public view—where it does have a bad influence on the community. 
I am also interested in picking up on the discussions about how people feel about graffiti in their community. The first thought about that—and I have had graffiti on my house because I live in the centre of Christchurch; the house is now knocked down but before it was knocked down—is that it absolutely impinges on you. You wonder why these people are painting nasty things all over your wall. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: It’s invasive. 
NICKY WAGNER 
: It is an invasion of your privacy. It is an invasion of something that you care about something that you have worked hard to look after and something that you have spent good money on too. 
Graffiti is a major problem in the urban areas and I have to say that the Hutt Valley has been particularly hard hit with this. It is that damage to property that upsets people. It gives a symbol of neglect and it is something that the community really does want to get rid of. The Hutt City Council does have good processes to deal with the problem. It has actually invested significant amounts of money to remove graffiti. It has a rapid removal process and I believe that it has very good contractors who are very experienced in this area but it is not cheap. The council spends over $300000 doing that work. We support it because it is doing it for the good of the community. 
The problem that we are trying to address with this bill is the fact that some landlords—not all but some landlords particularly absentee landlords—do not respond to the council when it requests the access to clean up their properties and so the council is stuck. It does not know how to deal with that. This bill will solve that problem. 
We did get seven submissions on the bill and the majority supported the bill but there were a few issues raised. One of the issues that we dealt with and we were really quite careful about was how we can clarify the difference between graffiti and art. This is quite an interesting case because how do you decide? Actually in the end we chose a definition that was consistent with section 11A of the Summary Offences Act 1981. What this does is it identifies graffiti as something that damages and defaces. It actually lists numerous methods you could use to do that but the crucial issue is that it was done without the lawful authority or the consent of the occupier and owner because sometimes it is actually quite hard to tell the difference. There have been some delightful stories of magnificent graffiti art that has been in galleries around the world and suddenly the cleaners have come in and cleaned it away. I think we have seen that people even in our own cities young people who have been doing tagging and who have been involved in this sort of process are actually quite creative and have some good ideas about art. We have been able to use them and get them out there painting over things. 
The funny thing is that if a graffiti artist actually puts a lot of effort into designing a painting to go over an area that has been tagged the chances are it will not be tagged again because if they have got the mana that they are actually creating such a good work nobody wants to destroy it. In actual fact in our city in Christchurch we have got several places where they could never control the graffiti so the neighbourhood got out and painted them beautifully. One of them is in the Shirley area where the rugby—no not rugby but the other one. What is it called? 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: League. 
NICKY WAGNER 
: League. That is right the league club. They had this great big huge wall that was always being tagged so in the end they got out there. They got out the paint the whole club painted it and it has never looked better ever since. 
There was one other tweak that we looked at in this bill. We were concerned that the council be transparent about the authority it had to access private property to remove graffiti and we also wanted to make sure that those contractors were easily identified by the public. So we actually made some changes to the bill to make that happen. 
The final concern was about the council and its liability or its duty of care towards those landlords when it is removing graffiti. We did not want to exempt it from taking reasonable care. We did not think it was right because contractors across the country have to take reasonable care otherwise they are liable and we thought that even though this is being done for the public good they still need to do the job properly. Actually I think in this case it was probably unnecessary to put it into the bill because the contractor that the council has at present is very skilled and does an excellent job. He matches the paint; he looks after the properties. But you never know what is going to happen in the long term and I think it was really important to cover that. 
In conclusion this bill was well drafted and the select committee with the help of advisers managed to get it into shape quickly and efficiently. It was an interesting bill to work on and I think we gave a good outcome to the Hutt City Council. As we have heard the Hutt City Council does have a really advanced graffiti eradication programme. That has had a positive effect on its community and we hope that this bill will help support that work. Thank you.