Queensland solicitor’s success in having shopping centre stop using high-pitched ‘Mosquito’ drives push for it to be barred around the country

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A community legal service that forced a Queensland shopping centre to stop using a sonic “anti-loitering” device after its own workers complained of headaches and ringing ears has called for a nationwide ban.

The shopping centre in Hervey Bay, a politically conservative coastal city known as the state’s retirement capital, claimed to be one of the first in Australia to install the “Mosquito”, which emits an irritating high-pitched tone aimed at people under 25.

The device – installed 10 years ago on the recommendation of police and operated at all hours without warning signs – gradually came to be associated by local youth with lasting “distressing ear ringing and pain”, according to the Taylor Street Community Legal Service.

Melissa Seymour-Dearness, a solicitor, gathered multiple accounts of affected youths, including a 15-year-old supermarket worker who suffered headaches after passing it on the way to work, said it was a “textbook case” of unlawful discrimination.

Mosquito youth dispersal alarms face ban Read more

The shopping centre owners recently agreed to remove the Mosquito after two years of pressure by Seymour-Dearness, who alerted anti-discrimination authorities to the case but stopped short of formal legal action.

Seymour-Dearness wants the federal government to “recognise the discriminatory nature of these devices and investigate product safety with a view to entirely banning its use within Australia”.

Centre management originally told her that “young people were more likely to commit public nuisance and possibly crime and a device was therefore warranted to deter loitering and unwelcome behaviour previously experienced”, Seymour-Dearness said.

The blanket effect of the device on young people who weren’t breaking the law violated the UN convention on rights of children and could constitute criminal assault, she argued.

“Usually when I mention it to people, it sounds like something out of a movie,” Seymour-Dearness said.

“Initially when [the shopping centre] wrote back to me they said the purpose of it was to make it a more pleasant experience for everyone and that they didn’t accept that it was discriminatory in this context. But in terms of the law, it is definitely unlawful. It’s a textbook example of discrimination. It’s black and white.

“I would like to see an outright ban on them. Aside from the discriminatory effect and the direct physical harm that it causes, to me too the concern is that it’s reinforcing a negative stereotype of young people.

“It’s demonising young people and I don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t think that’s the sort of society that any of us should have to live in.”

Seymour-Dearness said she appreciated the shopping centre would have assumed the device was lawful when it was recommended by a police officer, whose details the centre had provided.

The British company selling the device confirmed that its 17.5khz tone was generally heard only by people under 25 – including infants – and that its range had a radius of 15 metres, Seymour-Dearness said.

People had experienced pain and ringing ears for hours after leaving the device’s range, which included some shops and a bus stop routinely used by school students.

Young workers exposed to the device included a window cleaner Seymour-Dearness observed working directly beneath it.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have found it so offensive if they had a sign up and it was only on outside business hours, but people literally had no idea,” she said.

The shopping centre told the lawyer it was one of the first in Australia to install the Mosquito and it was now used all over the country.

A local council and businesses in the Western Australian city of Geraldton also sparked controversy when installing the device in 2012.

A Sydney council that played Barry Manilow songs to deter loitering in a beachside carpark reportedly considered the Mosquito in 2008 even as the children’s commissioner for England called for a ban in the UK where it was invented.

But youth advocates in Queensland had not heard of its use and no other cases were raised when Seymour-Dearness was in touch with the Human Rights Commission and the Queensland Anti-Discrimination commission, Seymour-Dearness said.

“They seem to be under the radar and I don’t know whether that’s because they’re not widespread or they’re there and people don’t know what’s giving them headaches so they don’t know to complain,” she said.

The Hervey Bay case was raised at an Australian Council of Human Rights Authorities meeting last November, prompting anti-discrimination authorities to press for an investigation by product safety regulators of the device’s effects on youths, people with disabilities and assistance animals.

Seymour-Dearness said this may have influenced the Hervey Bay shopping centre’s decision, which pre-empted formal legal pursuit of a discrimination complaint.

A 2007 report on the Mosquito by the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health could not certify the device as safe, and said it put small children and infants “especially at risk”.

This was due to possible “lengthy exposure to the sound, because the adults themselves do not perceive the noise”.

Its ultrasound effects went beyond hearing to “dizziness, headache, nausea and impairment”, although this was “not the limit of the total risks to safety and health”.