Turner Judy: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:649] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill. I say at the outset that we will be supporting the first reading of this bill in response to the request of the city council involved which obviously feels it has a problem it wants to deal with. 
The very first thing that occurred to me when I read this bill was the Broken Windows project in New York. It was interesting to grab some literature on that project and some of the research that has come even from within New Zealand shores in that regard and read the thinking behind it. The concern that many authors who write on this problem have is that if we decriminalise disreputable behaviour that “harms no one” and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighbourhood order we are making a mistake. For instance arresting a drunk or a vagrant who has not harmed anybody in an identifiable way can seem unjust but failing to do anything about a score of drunks or 100 vagrants can actually destroy an entire community. Small things do matter. However I do share some concerns that have been expressed by the Green member about how we should respond to this. Although we have some concerns with the bill as proposed our reason for supporting it is the opportunity to iron out its wrinkles in the select committee process. We believe that that opportunity should be afforded Manukau City because it is obviously facing some huge issues. 
Although in certain contexts graffiti is an art form that can and should be celebrated I believe that graffiti painted on my fence without my permission is an act of vandalism and it should be seen as such. We should not try to confuse the two. My own personal feeling about graffiti is that when I see it particularly in urban areas the message conveyed to me is: “Nobody cares about this place”. When people are led to believe that the environment they live in and connect with is not worth caring about then—as is well documented—there is a deterioration in society’s behaviour in general. A thesis  
Broken Windows 
 written back in 1986 linked behavioural decline in communities to what happens in a neighbourhood when a building has a broken window that is not repaired. The simple conclusion of that simple observation was that one broken window left broken resulted in a lot of broken windows in the same building and in the same neighbourhood. People in that neighbourhood began to feel unsafe in their own streets and moved out the criminal element moved in and an unsafe environment was created. The police in New York in particular started to take a harder line on what we would refer to as petty crime—like tagging like jumping over the barrier to get into the subway without paying like begging—and decided to make some real inroads into the area of petty crimes. As a consequence they saw a decline in the more concerning areas of crime. 
We are all aware of the recent publicity in Manukau about gangs and about some of the concerns that community has. So with the reservations that have been well clarified by other parties I think that this bill is worthy of consideration. Untied Future is very happy to support its first reading. We look forward to seeing the submissions on it. We would like to encourage the select committee as it considers the bill to look also at some of the projects dealing with the problem of graffiti. For instance Hamilton’s safer communities project has done some really interesting things regarding graffiti. Also Dr Pita Sharples mentioned some other initiatives up and down the country that he is aware of where a different and less punitive approach has been tried and has had some success. 
It may be that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to this problem and the suggestion that the Manukau City Council has put forward may be the solution for that community but I am not prepared to make a judgment on that right now. I think we need to be aware that when we enshrine in law initiatives of this kind a precedent is set and we could expect other councils to take action if this bill passes in its current form. We need to make sure that the consequences and the flow-on effect from that is what we are looking for. But United Future is happy to support the first reading and to see the work progressed.