Brian Rudman: Help needed to stop tacky signs

COMMENT

Our rich cousins in Remuera and Newmarket try to make out they're the arbiters of style and taste in this little town of ours. Why then, are they clamouring for the right to string tacky commercial advertising banners across their main shopping precincts.

Could there be anything less classy?

Fittingly, for a community built on the stuff, it's all about money. The business associations in Newmarket and Remuera see it as a cheap and lazy way of financing their mainstreet programmes.

Elsewhere in the city, community boards prefer to protect their streetscapes from this sort of visual pollution and go along with city council policy, which is to allow such banners only for the promotion of regional events and independent activities that "are of significant benefit to the public".

After months of lobbying by the Newmarket Business Association and the Hobson Community Board, deputy mayor David Hay and local councillor and Remuera chemist Scott Milne have indicated to the lobbyists they will push fellow councillors for a trial of cross-street advertising in Newmarket.

Holding firm is fellow Auckland Citizens and Ratepayers-Now councillor Juliet Yates, who chairs the city development committee which has to decide the issue.

Mrs Yates, one of the leaders in the successful fight to remove the scourge of sandwich boards from city streets, sees the cross-street banners as a similar blot on the streetscape. But she needs our support. It can get lonely when the boys start caucusing.

The last time the street banners hit the headlines was in May last year when lobbying by the Chinese Government resulted in two banners promoting appearances by Tibet's most famous exile, the Dalai Lama, being hauled down. One across Karangahape Rd reading "China out of Tibet" broke the city's rules and was rightly removed. The Queen St one, which promoted a rally, should have stayed, but was forced down as well.

While the council's sign police were quick to act on the Queen St signs, they have until recently turned a blind eye to the Newmarket ones.

The old pocket borough of Newmarket brought some of its old hick-town habits with it when it became absorbed into the greater Auckland City in the reforms of the late 1980s. Like the absorption of Hong Kong into China, the bigger partner in this forced marriage tolerated some of Newmarket's old foibles. For a while at least.

But about a year ago, Auckland City said there were to be no more commercial banners across Broadway or Khyber Pass.

One of the last banners across Broadway was apparently for The Den, a purveyor, I am told, of such stylish commodities as crutchless knickers and duo-loveballs.

One wonders if the Newmarket lobbyists shared this information with good Christians Mr Hay and Mr Milne?

Late last year the city's community boards were surveyed on the issue. The majority wanted the present system to remain; that is, only banners promoting community, school or charitable events were to be permissible. These boards allowed 25 per cent to 33 per cent of the banner to include a sponsor's name or logo.

The only two committees that wanted purely commercial advertising, with the profits going to the local mainstreet organisation, were Hobson and Maungakiekie wards.

To me, that seems like a pretty resounding vote for the status quo.

What the style meisters of Remmers think of this effort to beautify their two main shopping areas, I don't know. It certainly will be a point of difference to show off to their classy visitors from abroad. I can't imagine them having seen anything like it on previous shopping expeditions to competing strips like Fifth Ave or Regent St. It's hard to imagine them having seen such a sight anywhere else, in fact. Not in any city with pretensions to First World status anyway.

Commercial signage continues to be a curse on this city, obliterating views and smearing sides of buildings. Even public bodies do it. Auckland City, for example, plasters commercial signage in and outside its carparks, Transit New Zealand insults its engineers by selling off signage space on the sides of their carefully crafted viaducts.

Under Mrs Yates' guidance, the council has been endeavouring to tidy and tighten up its signage codes. The programme is not going as fast or as severely as some of us would like, but at least it's moving in the right direction.

For her Citrat colleagues to now consider white-anting this long campaign seems contrary behaviour indeed.