“We have more public rubbish bins than any other city in Australia, per capita, and yet we still have people that do the wrong thing,” she said. “We need to make sure that we continue to be vigilant on the emptying of those bins.”
The council has spent more than $1.1 million on graffiti removal this financial year – up from the usual $1 million – including new services to remove graffiti at heights and more frequent patrols in hot spots.
City looking very run down with rubbish and tagging on the streets.
Credit:Scott McNaughton
The City of Melbourne is also undertaking initiatives to prevent graffiti, including legal street art murals, community education and mentoring.
Councillor Roshena Campbell said more resources to clean up litter and graffiti more rapidly could tackle the problem.
“As someone who works in the city, I personally want every worker and visitor to return to a sparkling CBD,” she said. “Critical to that is making sure rapid response cleaning teams are responding rapidly.”
The increase in graffiti tagging is reflected in crime statistics, with 64 graffiti offences recorded in 2019 in Melbourne, 90 in 2020 and 171 in 2021. A spokesman for Victoria Police said Operation Fade began in the CBD in late February this year, targeting those involved in graffiti and vandalism.
The City of Melbourne has installed signs encouraging reporting of tagging and litter.Credit:Scott McNaughton
“Graffiti is far from a victimless crime – it is a devastating blow to small businesses who have been doing it tough over the last couple of years to find their properties damaged, and being left to cover the cost,” the spokesman said.
In just over a month, the team has arrested 14 people allegedly involved in graffiti, including four people who were remanded as a result of their offending.
“This should leave the community in no doubt that police take graffiti and other forms of criminal damage seriously, and if you do the wrong thing, you will be caught,” the spokesman said. Those convicted face up to two years’ imprisonment and fines of up to $43,000.
But this punitive approach may not be the right way forward, according to Wendy Steele, associate professor in the school of global, urban and social studies at RMIT.
Steele said it was an outdated approach to believe cities could be tamed, and what was needed was to understand these activities better and in a more nuanced way.
“We want our cities to be clean, hygienic and liveable, but we don’t want them to be excluded from being creative and spontaneous,” Steele said.
She said Melbourne needed to look at the cause of tagging and litter, with so many people constrained for such a long time during Melbourne’s lockdowns.
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“It is just this explosion of frustration and overflow of people who have been contained and trapped at every level physically and emotionally,” she said.
Steele said there was an inherent conflict between the City of Melbourne’s crackdown on graffiti taggers and encouragement and promotion of street art.
“In one way the city encourages certain forms of creativity but the idea that you can control everything is not realistic,” she said. “We all know cities that are very clean and very orderly and very boring, and that’s not Melbourne.”
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