Community-wide clean-up: Turramurra Rotary's plan for a Graffiti-free future
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I was talking about graffiti on the program last Friday, 131873, and I'd like your thoughts on this, about whether it's getting worse in your area. Now, we've been dealing with graffiti problems for decades now. This is not new.

But what I'm finding is that where graffiti is being, what areas are being vandalised seems to be spreading. So clearly I don't think we are dealing with it in the right way. Now we found a member of the community who spends a lot of time removing graffiti from public areas. His name is Roger Norman. He's from Turramurra's Rotary Club and he founded Graffiti Removal Squad. It's been running since 2008. I wonder how it works. Roger joins us. Hello Roger.

Hi Clinton, how are you? I'm good. You sound like a good fella. What do you do? Well, I'm retired now, but when I left work, I decided to join Rotaries. I want to do some charity work and I saw graffiti in the area where I live at Taramara and I thought that sounds like a good project to get rid of the graffiti in the area. So week

We go out every Tuesday, providing it's not raining or even if there's no graffiti around. And we go out for a few hours and get rid of the graffiti in various ways, yes. See, Roger, the reason I raised this topic on my show on Friday is I was wandering through the CBD the other day and I noticed a Telstra phone box or the phone booth that they still have. There was this Telstra worker with his paint scraper out and he was scraping off the graffiti tags. And I thought to myself, geez, what an awful job that bloke has.

but you're actually volunteering your time to do it. Yeah, that's right. It's a good community project as far as a rotary is concerned. And, well, as far as I was personally concerned, I didn't want to live in a suburb that was full of graffiti. So it's just a matter of keeping at it, that's all. And that's why we go out almost religiously every week.

Do you find there are areas that you spend a bit of time with your crew removing graffiti and then the next week it just comes back?

Oh, yes. For example, quite a while ago, we had a bus shelter that was every week for about eight weeks, it was perpetually graffitied. But guess what? The ninth week they gave up. So that's the secret, really, that you've got to remove the graffiti in order to make it less attractive for people to put it up.

But unfortunately, there are people that seem to get a bit of fun out of it and go from suburb to suburb and so on and do the graffiti. It's amazing, really. It's very hard to understand why, but they seem to get something out of it and tell their mates that they've been around, you know.

What they're doing in Melbourne is they now have a scheme whereby if they find the perpetrators, which is half the battle, but if they find those responsible, they make them clean it up themselves or they make them pay for it. What would you think about that? Yeah, that scheme is still kind of in vogue here. There's websites that you can put the...

tags onto and if they find or catch someone tagging then they can go back to these records and actually find people or have them up for all the tags, not just the one they were caught on. The trouble with that also is that people have various responsibilities. For instance, if they're kids they might have to go to school

school and so on. And then if you get them to do it at the weekend, that means someone's got to supervise them and so on. And places like councils and the police mightn't be able to do that type of thing at the weekend. So it's not easy. I would like to see something like a deterrent, and I don't know whether this would ever work, but there's

As a penalty, then they get their licence deferred for 12 months or 24 months. So in the other words, if they're 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, that might kind of make them think twice about doing it. That's just a...

Personal theory, I have. Good idea, Roger. That's a really good idea. That'd probably put a lot of 16-year-olds off if they can't get their licence when they turn seven, eh? Mate, well done for what you do. If you feel that it works, maybe after eight times of removing that graffiti, you're making a valuable contribution.

But I must admit we're very lucky that graffiti has decreased in our area. That's good. But I do go to other suburbs nearby and, you know, unfortunately it's not decreasing. So, you know, I think it's worthwhile to at least make an attempt to get rid of it. Good on you, Roger. Thank you, mate.

Roger Norman, he's from the Graffiti Removal Squad, part of the Tarahumara Rotary Club. Good on him. So, as he explained there, yes, he'll go to a spot and they remove the graffiti and then the vandals come back. But after about six or seven times, they start getting the message and they don't come back anymore. Great. I still think if there was a way you could make those who are caught responsible...

I think that'd start to get the message through. I like his idea though. Say that, you know what, we're going to defer your license. You won't be able to get your P's when you're 17. That'd get the message through. What do you reckon? Let me know. 131873. It's 9 to 4.