One small step for man....

As the Chinese supposedly say, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step".

In the middle of 2008, I started to wonder whether government authorities like EnergyAustralia were reporting graffiti on their property to the Police.  As time went by, it became pretty obvious that the answer was no.  

From my haphazard observations, an awful lot of the graffiti that mars our public spaces is scrawled on government assets.  Most agencies have some sort of system to get it removed, but unless it is reported, the statistics will never truly reflect the amount of damage being done, and the effort required to clean it up.  

A good statistical picture also allows someone with the right training to discern patterns and to target resources to where they can do the most good.  At present, most of the statistics on graffiti in this area are based around Council property, because the Council reports everything - but that skews the picture.  You can have areas that have little or no Council property, but are utterly blighted by graffiti, yet they will not show up in the statistics as problem areas because nothing has been reported.

I wrote to the Minister for Energy last month and got this response today in regard to EnergyAustralia.

Good.  It's a small step, and more need to be taken, but a small step is better than none.  Now for the next ones.........