Page 4445 - Week 12 - Thursday, 26 October 2017
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I have now gone through the recommendations of the report of the committee as a whole, and I am pleased to support them. I am now going to speak for myself, as Caroline Le Couteur, because keen readers will find that there are additional comments at the back of the report which I make in my individual capacity. I am speaking because while, as I said, I am in agreement with the committee report, I would like to see it go further.
The community responded overwhelmingly to this inquiry, and the near-unanimous view was that Canberra should not have more billboards; it should have fewer, preferably none. Only six submissions told the committee that they supported billboards. Furthermore, almost 780 people signed a petition calling for the government to “maintain the prohibition on billboard advertising in the ACT and properly enforce the current rules that regulate public advertising in the territory”.
The first submission the committee received was from Craig McGill. It set the tone of the community comment by saying:
Go and find something else to do but we do not want billboards in any way, shape or form. Just stop it.
This view continued. As Mr Chris Endrey noted:
… there was a virtual consensus amongst the … commenters across all of their platforms: the community is strongly opposed to billboard advertising in the ACT.
The community gave a number of reasons for objections, but the most common reason was concern about visual pollution. And I wonder if the lack of billboards in Canberra may be one of the reasons that Canberra made it to number three in the Lonely Planet’s list yesterday. As Jacqui Malins stated:
It is always a relief to come home to Canberra from other capital cities because of the much lower level of visual “noise”. Our natural environment is subtle but stunning, and as “the bush capital”, it sets us apart.
Many other submitters were also concerned about possible negative impacts on drivers. As Neville Hills stated:
Outdoor advertising on highways etc. exists solely to distract drivers, why else would it be there?
Many submitters, I am afraid, assumed that the reason to consider more billboards was government and commercial revenue, and they were offended by this. As Stuart McMillen put it:
I object to billboard advertising because it privatises the public spaces of our city … We enter a situation where certain advertisers profit, and the rest of the community suffers visual pollution at the expense of a few winners.
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