Page 547 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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TAMS, at my request, approached the organisation that printed these posters and they gave the response which every organisation that TAMS ever approaches in relation to illegal bill posting makes: “Yes, we did pay some people to hang the posters for us, but we did not expect they would act illegally. For goodness sake, no. If we had known they were going to act illegally we would never have employed them. For goodness sake, we only printed a thousand of them. We assumed they would find enough legal places for a thousand posters. It never crossed our minds that they would hang 400 or 500 of them up on public property.” I think every switching box at every set of traffic lights in the ACT received one of these glued posters.
That is the nature of the issue. And there is an issue. It is a constant refrain through this place about graffiti and mess. The number of motions, the number of debates, the number of hours that have been consumed in this place over the last five years about graffiti, about mess and about illegal bills being posted are enormous.
Mr Pratt made his entire career on the subject. Mr Pratt, I think with the urging of Mrs Dunne from time to time, pursued this particular issue vehemently, to the point of actually painting out legal art. But that just gives some background and it just gives some insight into the significance of the issue.
I think it is quite simple. We need a mechanism; we need the capacity to identify the issue. What is the issue? What is the problem we are seeking to fix? The problem we are seeking to fix is that those that print the posters and those that take the steps to have them hung currently are completely exempt from any capacity by parks rangers or Territory and Municipal Services to actually address their behaviour.
This is the current situation: it is illegal to post bills. This particular piece of legislation proposes that we actually change some of the arrangements in relation to that particular offence; namely, that on-the-spot fines might be issued to make that process far more streamlined and easy. But that is the simple part. That is the poor bloke or girl that has been employed by an entrepreneur to hang them. And as the law stands, we can get them if we see them posting the bills, which almost never happens. It is interesting that this particular employment is generally, it seems, pursued at night time, in the dark. This is not a daytime pursuit. These perhaps are people with daytime jobs, but this bill posting activity, particularly the illegal bill posting activity, is almost exclusively pursued at night.
We then need to go to the next step. These are the people creating the problem. I just invite you—a lot of them are still there—to actually inspect every single box between Condor and the Gungahlin shops. There are hundreds of these posters and then, when their owners are approached, they say, “Heck, we never ever expected that our hundreds of posters would be used in this way.”
How do you deal with this? The only way you could deal with this of course is through the creation of an offence, and the offence that we created was one of recklessly doing it. I cannot imagine any other way of doing this; I just do not see how else it could be done. But I am at one level. I will conclude on that. But that is the rationale. That was the situation.
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