°War on Graf
(via)
Melbourne has a “graffiti epidemic”, so diagnosed in order to justify the introduction of laws to “eradicate” it in time for the Commonwealth Games. Seems my remarks about likely links between the war on (to) terror(ise) to a possible war on graffiti weren’t at all far fetched. According to Melbourne’s new antiGraf Czar, Peter Clark:
Part of the problem that it currently confronts is, that it’s on a State Government owned assets and we’ve got no right to come in and remove it and the State Government does nothing. The other problem we’ve got is on private property where we’ve got no right to enter, or access or remove it off the side of a building. So we need some local laws, in fact probably some state legislation, which enables us to get in and fix up what has become an epidemic around Melbourne
The State Government just announced today that they would begin a campaign to clean the graf off. There’s also pressure to ban Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, the graf computer game. I’m not sure how this has played out. (But it has to be noted that adult-rated computer games are already illegal in Australia.)
That’s pretty funny, considering games like Civilization have the aim of exterminating first all the ‘barbarians’, then everyone else - that’s fine. But if someone smokes a joint in a game, or has sex - boom, THAT’s frying someone’s moral cortex. … I’m being unfair on Civ. You can also run away to Alpha Centauri and leave the clods choking on your nuke dust. What a wholesome game that was.
But on the graf thing, it’s fucked up. You can get put away for it. What I find really off kilter, though, is that there is so much focus on the antiwar guys who got hammered over the opera house, but then there is a like a batallion of graffers out in the west who go down on hardcore jail terms, none of this please pay our cleaning bill stuff… and they generally make much more interesting work. I like stencils, but there is no point fighting just for that or for that english prankster guy; freeing aesthetics and the urban environment from the state involves, inevitably, saving it from the tyranny that is ‘art’, with all the rubbish determinations that come with that.
Which reminds me, Contents Under Pressure is sponsored by Mark Ecko … it’s essentially an ad. *sigh*
obsessively cutting into tables [October 1, 2005 @ 1:11 am]
While it’s probably quite true to say that there is something of a graf ‘epidemic’ in Melbourne (more so than in other AU cities), it’s also been in decline over the last couple of years - a degree of saturation perhaps, a degree of digestion as the (’alternative’) Tourist Industry circulates images of graf heavy streets … But, since “studies have shown” that “people [ie., you know, people with lots of money] feel safer” on grafless streets, Melbourne is about to get a “clean up” along with the introduction of new ‘antiterror laws’. Cleaning contractors and patrols by Blackhawk helicopters is what we have to look forward to on the streets over the coming months.
If these circumstances doesn’t focus some sense of what’s at stake, I’m not sure what would.
s0metim3s [October 1, 2005 @ 1:43 am]
Every few years there is one of these clean up the streets type things; I seriously doubt it will ever get as bad as what happens in Sao Paulo or Rio, but maybe I am naive. My guess is that the politicians themselves could not really care about these laws either way, they’re not particularly interested on whether they stop terrorists or destroy society, the main point is to keep the resemblance of action going, mostly for public consumption. The spin offs, like the possibility to criminalising all sorts of ‘behaviours’, as they say in social work, like heckling the party bosses - that’s only the cherry on the sunday if that, and I would not be surprised if Bracks and pals are honest when they say these are terrible measures which personally they would not wish implemented. I doubt they don’t know that these laws will make little difference, and that troops in Melbourne are only the reassuring semblance of totalitarianism. But the needs of party are strong and they are willing to compromise themselves for short term goals; they have to look competent no matter what, since they know fully well that their other policies make terror a near certainty. But they are willing to accept that. So we get blackhawk patrols and clean up operations, and legislation imported from Apartheid South Africa, and a very much undiminished, very much real threat that someone will eventually set off a bomb.
differenzmaschine [October 1, 2005 @ 10:46 am]
Unlike Carr (Iema i don’t know about) or Beazley, Bracks inclines toward a digestible multiculturalism - although Kennet did too (this is Melbourne, after all). But he’s not reluctant.
Beazley (ALP, Oppostition Leader), otoh, is worse than even Howard. This from an interview:
Prompted a couple of times in the interview that this is no different from what the Government is proposing he adds:
A whole suburb open to ’search and seizure’ and ‘lockdown’, without a warrant. In Melbourne, this “suburb” would mean Coburg. This is where I live. So, I’m feeling a little interpellated, and by no means any safer. I’ve remarked before that I feel safer in Coburg than most other places. Now, I feel like it’s about to be occupied.
s0metim3s [October 1, 2005 @ 1:03 pm]
probably dandenong as well.
dr.woooo [October 3, 2005 @ 9:18 am]
Sure thing, Beazley is trying to flank Howard from the right, and the measures they are putting through are very dangerous and will be used, as all the signals out of the UK indicate. My point is rather about what’s to blame for this. I doubt that these people are personally very committed to turning the country into a fascist wasteland, they are mostly concerned, I think, with short-term solutions to their own problems, which mostly revolve around polls and perceptions. I don’t think they have much of an idea of what they are doing, as a matter of fact. They’re just bumbling around like idiots trying to look serious, latching onto this or that psychotic rightwing jurist for effect, posing with this threat or that repressive measure as a prop, etc… The net accumulation of this unbelievably ham-fisted legislation is that Australia will look a bit like England in the 1980s. Which, if it leads to an upsurge of quality punk, is a good thing.
As for the suburbs thing, Beazley is just talking out of his arse. If such measures were actually used, there would be a pretty serious outcry; and if there was a situation in which the outrcy could be tolerated, then we’d be in lex talionis territory anyway.
differenzmaschine [October 3, 2005 @ 4:33 pm]