Clendon David: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5404. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a brief call to reaffirm the Greens support for this bill the Hutt City Council (Graffiti Removal) Bill. At the risk of further offending Mr Hipkins’ sensibilities I will refer to the Hutt City Council given that it is the entity in whose name this bill is. It does deserve congratulations particularly to the mayor who I understand has provided some real leadership on this to get the solution to this point where the bill is being passed into law. 
I do not pretend to know either Upper Hutt or Lower Hutt well. Certainly I have no particular close experience of them. But having up until quite recently lived much of my life in Auckland City I am no stranger to graffiti or to the significant cost that is imposed visually socially and not least of all economically. I think there would be a very strong case to encourage other councils to pick up a similar piece of legislation and for this House to create some sort of general law that would enable other councils to resolve the issue of entering on to private land to remove this unsightly blot on the landscape which graffiti is and always will be. 
As I said I do not know the Hutt particularly well but I am interested to note that in the report from the Local Government and Environment Committee comparison was made with the Auckland rail corridor. I do know a thing or two about the scale of the problem in that context. I know that KiwiRail supported by some very able and willing volunteer groups has been working incredibly hard to try to clean up the Auckland rail corridor. So if Hutt City is experiencing the problem on the same scale as that then it most certainly does have a problem. Indeed KiwiRail in Auckland ran up against the same issue of private buildings bordering its rail corridor. It needed to seek permission to go and actually remove the graffiti there for the simple reason that it had no absolute right to deal with that. A bill of this nature I suspect would have facilitated that process for it considerably and for that reason the bill is to be supported. 
The point has been made that the Greens did oppose a previous attempt to manage graffiti which was the Manukau solution as it was possessed at the time. We saw that that was not the path to go down to effectively criminalise young people for simply carrying marker pens. It was a highly complicated and somewhat punitive approach. This is a much cleaner simpler approach. It simply puts the solution in the hands of the local authority in the community not without considerable cost and I acknowledge that but over time hopefully we will uncover and apply some longer-term solutions. 
Like Mr Auchinvole I am actually old enough to recall when graffiti really was not particularly a problem in our cities towns and elsewhere. It is unfortunate to see that it has become so ubiquitous so costly and so negative in our communities. In fact I recall in the late 1970s just as a hobby I did some photographic courses and did a little bit of a photographic essay of some of the graffiti that was around Auckland. Almost without exception it was social and political commentary. Some of it was very clever some of it was very witty and some of it was very apt to the political context of the day. That is not to excuse it or suggest that it is acceptable but I literally had to go looking for examples of graffiti and that was not that long ago. Nowadays of course one is hard-pressed in many areas or in many communities to find a wall that has not been defaced at some point. We have certainly got to a serious situation with this graffiti. 
I think the definition of graffiti in the bill is good. I think it is a very useful and positive addition to the bill—to the legislation—that we are defining very clearly what it is we are talking about to avoid the unfortunate incidents where murals—“graffiti art” as it is referred to will be protected. Again I am not particularly a fan of graffiti art but I acknowledge that there are many who do admire it and appreciate it and it has proven to be a very effective mechanism for preventing the tagging the defacing that we are seeing far too much of. 
As I have said we need to continue to investigate the root causes: youth alienation and the fact that particularly youth who perform the tagging clearly have no empathy no sense of the impact and the negative costs they are imposing the social costs and making people feel vulnerable if their homes or properties are damaged by graffiti. That is a much more difficult task. It will take a great deal of work by local government community and other authorities. I commend this bill and the Hutt City Council for this very useful measure. Kia ora.