00:00Whether it's art or vandalism, love it or hate it, there's plenty of graffiti in Melbourne.
00:07I think it's amazing. I think that it adds to the energy that you get here. I'm always
00:13really excited to see new things.
00:16Some people see it as a rite of passage. Frankly, I just see it as vandalism.
00:20Cleaning any graffiti in Melbourne City is a huge blow to the bottom line for the City
00:24Council, prompting a spray and a new plan from the Lord Mayor.
00:28It's costing us millions of dollars each year to clean up.
00:33Street art precincts like Hosier Lane will be immune, but the Council's putting other
00:37offenders on notice. Taking an activist approach by having an active role in court proceedings,
00:43making vandals pay for clean-up costs and pushing police to improve enforcement of graffiti
00:49laws.
00:50I want to see more prosecutions though. I want to see people caught and prosecuted for
00:56these crimes.
00:57Graffiti tags like these ones are only a metre or so wide, but to put it into scale, the
01:03Council says it cleaned almost 70,000 square metres of graffiti in 2021. That figure has
01:10only grown since then to more than 110,000 square metres in 2024, or five times the surface
01:18area of the MCG.
01:20From areas so covered in graffiti, it may as well be wallpaper.
01:24We're so used to it and we just see the whole art thing as such a feature of Melbourne and
01:30such a feature of Melbourne laneways.
01:32The measures were approved at a Council meeting last night and will come into effect in the
01:36coming weeks.
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