South-east Queenslanders of a certain age will remember a television jingle for Brisbane’s Seven network affiliate, BTQ-7, from 1983. Sung by the one-hit wonder Kim Durant, the catchy campaign number was entitled Love You Brisbane. It’s a turn that brings back memories of a smaller, more innocent Brisbane: a friendly river city with kids playing on lawns.

That’s not the way most Australians remember Brisbane in the 1980s. The period is best known these days for the era of crime and corruption that flourished under the National party rule of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, along with heavy-handed police repression of local culture.

This was the Brisbane where police were paid in brown paper bags of cash, where Aboriginal activists were harassed and beaten, and where live music venues were regularly raided. As Andrew Stafford would write in his book Pig City, “Looking like a rock’n’roll star could get you into serious trouble in Queensland.”

Brisbane in 2016 is supposedly very different. It proudly proclaims itself Australia’s “new world city”. According to the shiny, happy people at Brisbane Marketing, the river city is “capitalising on its enhanced international reputation”.

“Brisbane is shaping itself as a vibrant hub and world leader attracting industry sectors that are globally scalable in the new world economy,” the spiel continues.

But while the city celebrates its global aspirations, we found out last week that not everything in Brisbane is quite so welcome. One thing that doesn’t appear to be “globally scalable” is world-famous street art.

On Thursday last week the artist Anthony Lister was found guilty of four counts of wilful damage after Queensland police prosecuted him in the wake of a Brisbane city council complaint.

The irony for the “New World City” is that Lister is one of Brisbane’s best-known cultural exports. His work has regularly been championed by the very local government that has pursued him. He got his start painting traffic boxes – with the council’s encouragement – and he is now one of Australia’s hottest contemporary artists, his work gracing the walls and galleries of some of Australia’s and America’s trendiest and best-connected.

His work is highly collectable; trade at shows has been brisk. Unusually for an Australian artist, Lister has also crossed over into broader media and popular attention. When it comes to the artworld in Australia right now, Lister is a pretty big deal.

But Lister is also an artist whose work straddles a difficult legal divide. He is, first and foremost, a street artist, who came to prominence through his outdoor work. Gallery shows have followed but Lister continues to be best known for his murals, which achieve a scale impossible in even the largest loft apartment.



In December 2013, Rise street-art festival in Christchurch, New Zealand, commissioned a dozen large street-art paintings in the city centre – an effort to regenerate areas hit hard by the 2011 earthquake. Photograph: Jocelyn Kinghorn/Flickr

At least in terms of aesthetic culture, the prosecution seems likely to damage Brisbane’s “enhanced international reputation”. Does this represent a return to Brisbane’s bad old days of persecuting artists?

That’s certainly the view put forward by Brisbane’s former deputy mayor, the artist David Hinchliffe. Telling journalists he was “sickened and amazed” at the charges, Hinchliffe added: “if Anthony does not get off this charge, Brisbane, as a city, will be humiliated.”

On face value, it seems as though the Brisbane city council has been working with Queensland police to target Lister. The council has form when it comes to Lister’s work – painting over legal murals of his in 2010 and 2013, for instance. (In the latter case, the council had in fact commissioned Lister to paint the wall.) In May 2014 the council buffed over another of his pieces – “they could’ve pulled off the door, sold it for $10,000” the artist said at the time – and in November the same year he was charged with 12 counts of wilful damage and spent 1- hours in a Brisbane watch-house.

If you doubt that Lister is being pursued to send a message to other street artists, consider one of the charges against him last week: wilful damage, for painting a small mural on a firehose cabinet. Few ostensibly criminal acts can have had such benign public consequences.

But under the Liberal-National lord mayor Graham Quirk, Brisbane city council has adopted a zero tolerance approach to the supposed scourge of graffiti. To justify its stance, the council’s “Controlling graffiti” web page cites the largely discredited “broken windows” theory of the conservative sociologist James Q Wilson.

Wilson and his co-author George Kelling wrote an article in 1982 in which they argued that “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing”. If cities failed to prevent small crimes and maintain their urban environments, the result, they argued, would be more crime. But later studies by criminologists found little evidence for the “broken windows” theory: crime has been dropping in the US for decades, including in jurisdictions where broken windows-inspired policing tactics weren’t used.



Moreover, it takes a pretty warped view of property rights to hold that a world-famous artist painting over one of the city’s dusty street cabinets is somehow “damage”. It’s an even longer bow to draw to argue that painting a small mural on a piece of street furniture will encourage crime – after all, Queensland experienced no spike in street crime over the past few years of Brisbane’s continued campaign encouraging artists to paint traffic boxes.

And yet Brisbane city council seems only too happy about the prosecution. For the likes of Krista Adams, the Liberal-National councillor in charge of the city’s “lifestyle” committee, the moral certainty is clear.

“This is not a debate about the value of street art, this is a debate about whether it is acceptable to paint another person’s private property without their knowledge or permission,” Adams said last week.

The court accepted that Lister didn’t have permission to paint the firehose box, but local citizens must wonder why police and council resources are being spent on prosecuting such harmless crimes. The Lister action would have cost Queenslanders tens of thousands: there was a police and council investigation, plus the legal expenses of a two-day trial.

When I spoke to him last Thursday, Lister was disappointed. “It would have been nice to get off for wilful damage, considering my intent was to beautify what I was painting on,” he told Guardian Australia. “But I understand I got off quite lightly compared to other painters like myself that are in jail right now or waiting for sentencing.”



The high-profile show trial ended badly for police and the council. The magistrate, Barry Cosgrove, found Lister not guilty on the principal charge and declined to record a conviction on four counts of wilful damage. Police withdrew eight other charges.



Cosgrove also accepted the request made by Lister’s lawyer, Stewart Levitt, to make a donation of $5,000 to the city to advance street art projects, which included $440 in “restitution”. Lister was given just five hours of community service – and it was recommended that he not be forced to remove graffiti as part of it.

The slap on the wrist highlights the poverty of Adams’ rhetoric and suggests that the court did not see this as an assault on private property. If the intent was to send a message to other street artists, the prosecution has failed.



Indeed, it’s hard to see that anything has been achieved, except the persecution of one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed and collectable artists. The ethos of Pig City appears to be alive and well.

