Government to attack graffiti artists from all sides

Annette King

The Government is about to launch a new weapon in the ongoing war against graffiti - the Stop (Stop Tagging Our Place) strategy.

Police Minister Annette King said Stop, which will be announced in the next fortnight, includes legislative change, funding for council and community anti-graffiti programmes and targeted enforcement improvements.

It is hoped the changes will help eradicate what has become a multi-million-dollar headache.

"We're going to have a more clearly identified offence of graffiti and tagging, increased sentences and enable community work to be established as a sentence," she said.

The minister has firsthand experience of tagging having just painted out a tag on the side of her garage - for the second time in six weeks.

"We had a tagger go through Hataitai on a Saturday night and had a great old time - they even left one of their spray cans in the gutter outside my place because they couldn't get the lid off it."

Ms King said she felt angry at the violation of her private property and immediately painted out the tag which she described as a personal autograph.

"Any satisfaction the tagger might have got from having their name plastered out on the street was pretty quickly removed."

While she understood the level of frustration about tagging, Ms King said that was no justification at all for murder or violence - a reference to the 15-year-old tagger who was killed in Manurewa last Saturday night.

The full scale of the tagging problem is largely unknown. There is no central agency which gathers statistics, but in the worst hit cities - Auckland and Manukau - authorities spent almost $3 million cleaning up graffiti last year.

That is likely to be a fraction of the real cost as it does not include a host of targets including private properties or those owned by Transit or rail authorities.

Trusts have begun spreading as local authorities work with communities to stamp out the problem.

The Government is hoping to get agreement to change the stalled Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) private member's bill into a government bill that would apply nationwide.

. The Manukau bill has been held up after advice parts of it were in breach of the Bill of Rights.