KEY POINTS:
Art, particularly in these post-modern days, is in the eye of the beholder. There are even people, presumably those whose property hasn't been tagged in the night by sneaky little toe-rags, who hold graffiti up for praise.
Not me. The scrawl that returned to my neighbourhood walls a couple of days back is not the juvenilia of a budding young McCahon, it's the territorial spraying of some anti-social attention seeker. And it makes you - like Police Minister Annette King, whose property got tagged recently - feel violated and grumpy and impotent.
Of course it's a minor offence, as crimes go, but cumulatively, it leaves neighbourhoods trashed, and victims seething.
Over the next two weeks the Government is to launch a new weapon in the war against graffiti - the Stop (Stop Tagging Our Place) strategy. But with Mrs King indicating the Government won't back the banning of spray-can sales to under 18s, as Manukau City has fought for over the past two years, Stop seems doomed to slow failure.
She says there'll be more funding for local council clean-up projects, and tougher punishment for taggers. But without removing the weapons at source, all the get-tough tactics are likely to do is add a bit more excitement to the nocturnal activities, create new heroes, and deter no one.
Mrs King believes the most effective punishment is forcing taggers to clean up their mess in the full glare of the public eye. Hopefully so. But first you have to catch them, prosecute them, call for probation reports and debate whether bad parenting made them do it. All at great expense. And they just keep coming. Even under existing law, Auckland City had 191 arrests last year, West Auckland 182 and so on and on.
In the medical world, when you have an epidemic like this, you don't sit around waiting to treat each patient as they succumb, you try to wipe out the virus at source. Manukau City's proposed legislation wanted to ban the sale of spray cans to under-18-year-olds within its boundaries only. All that would have done was drive the kids across to an Auckland City shop, or to an older mate.
The obvious way to kill this virus in its tracks is to outlaw paint spray-cans totally. And nationally. If my experience is anything go by, they're only produced to swell paint manufacturers' profits anyway.
Most of the paint ended up on everything but the thing I was aiming at.
But even if we accept they have their uses, and my aim stinks, the question is, do the advantages outweigh the negatives? From the view of society as a whole, you have to say no.
Auckland and Manukau City ratepayers are billed $3 million a year for cleaning up graffiti. In Manukau alone, 317,000 tags were painted over last year, using 25,760 litres of paint. There are similar problems across the region. And these are only the tags officially cleaned off by over-worked and ill-resourced council graffiti swat teams. Who knows how many householders do their own repairs. Then there's the blanket tagging along rail and road routes which remain lingering blots on the landscape.
No doubt a ban won't stop the hard-core tagger. But having to use a paint brush or hand-powered sprayer will slow him down. And hopefully the opportunist thrill-seekers will decide it's no longer worth the hassle.
No doubt legitimate users of paint spray-cans will be inconvenienced. But sometimes them's the breaks.
Once every 18 months or more, I succumb to a brief bout of hay fever. There's only one medication that provides almost instant relief. Unfortunately it contains pseudoephedrine, which is something to do with the evil drug P.
Apparently if you get large quantities of my favoured hay fever tablets, and know how to, you can extract the chemical and make P.
Luckily I have seven tablets left, expiry date June 2006, which should help if my nose suddenly starts running, because the last time I tried to buy a new pack I thought the chemist was going to push the alarm buzzer.
So if a popular and useful medication can be black-listed to try to protect idiots who choose to take killer drugs, then why not a paint spray-can that causes so much mayhem?
