Open-Street CCTV in Australia: The Politics of
Resistance and Expansion
*
Adam Sutton
1 and Dean Wilson2
Abstract
This paper summarizes the first systematic attempt to document and assess the extent of open-street CCTV
systems in Australia. In addition to providing empirical data, this paper argues that it is tempting for
Australian scholars, and those elsewhere, to view the UK ‘surveillance revolution’ as the harbinger of
inevitable global trends sweeping across jurisdictions. However analysis of the Australian data suggests
that the deployment of CCTV in other national contexts may follow substantially divergent patterns. While
the Australian CCTV experience follows many trends exhibited in other nations, it is nevertheless significant
that the diffusion of CCTV in Australia has been more restrained than in the UK. We suggest that the
divergence between the UK and Australian experiences resides in contrasting political structures and the
consequent variation in the strength of debate and resistance at the local level.
Introduction
While Australia achieved formal independence from Britain more than a century ago, legacies
from our colonial history – reflected not just in a shared language but in political, educational,
other cultural and administrative traditions – are considerable. Australian criminologists continue
to rely far more on British journals and key texts (e.g. Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973; Cohen,
1985; Garland, 1996; 2001) than on theory and research from North America or continental
Europe. Our laws, courts, police, corrections and other criminal justice procedures and
institutions still bear the imprint of their English progenitors.
The consequence of this lingering influence is a tendency to perceive innovations in Australian
crime policy and social control merely as variants of grand narratives being played out in the
British context. Nowhere is the temptation greater than in the field of open-street closed circuit
television (CCTV). Compared with the United Kingdom, which has seen massive expansion in
schemes since the mid-1990s, Australian experience with open-street CCTV is inchoate.
*
The research for this paper was funded by Australian Criminology Research Council Grant 26/01-02
1
Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne, Australia. mailto:adamcs@unimelb.edu.au
2
School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia.
mailto:Dean.Wilson@arts.monash.edu.au
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According to Williams, Johnstone and Goodwin (2000) by the end of 1999 the United Kingdom
had at least 530 town centre schemes operating or scheduled for establishment. By contrast,
Australian State, Territory and local authorities had implemented just 33 systems by the end of
2002. Australian research is also underdeveloped.
The current paper summarizes the first systematic attempt to document and assess open-street
CCTV systems in Australia. Based on site inspections, reviews of documentation and interviews
with system managers and other relevant personnel, it aims to understand economic and political
forces promoting the spread of this new control technology. It also explores factors that have
hindered implementation. Compared with Britain, Australia has been slow to join the
‘surveillance revolution’. We want to explore why this has been the case.
Our starting point is to contest conventional wisdom about reasons for installing open-street
CCTV. The ‘official’ rationale is that it is a cost effective way to combat public crime and
disorder. Considerable Home Office and other funds have been expended on efforts to
demonstrate this. Both Australian and British (Mackay, 2003) experience suggests, however,
that reasons for resorting to public space CCTV are more complex. While specific incidents of
crime and disorder can be important triggers, less tangible factors such as a general decline in
feelings of safety in public in the late-modern era, the tendency for security to be commodified,
and competition between and within urban venues to attract and retain consumers (Garland,
2001: 154-165; Zedner, 2000: 208-209; McCahill, 2002: 12-13) are critical in fuelling
demands for ‘something to be done’.
Whether this ‘something’ takes the form of closed circuit television depends, however, on crime
prevention and community safety mechanisms and cultures in place at the local level and on
economic, legislative and other interchanges that may be occurring between these groups and
central authorities charged with developing and implementing State- or nation-wide strategies.
Australian experience may be revelatory in this respect. In our view, it suggests that the advent
and spread of open-street CCTV may be more contingent, and that there may be more scope
for individual and collective interventions to try to reshape, resist and ‘manage’ this phenomenon,
than readings of British experience seem to allow.
Methodology
Our study involved semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 34 personnel involved in the
daily operation of CCTV schemes in 22 locations throughout Australia. In most cases interview
subjects were program managers, although in several locations responsibility for CCTV was
divided between policy and security divisions of local government (in which case all relevant
personnel were approached). Police were also interviewed in many locations. Information on the
remaining 11 schemes was gathered via telephone interviews.
The final report (Wilson and Sutton, 2003) provides an overview of Australian open-street
CCTV systems and documents the social and governmental context of system installation,
administering bodies, funding arrangements, operator training, codes of practice and mechanisms
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of accountability. In this paper we focus on factors leading to the implementation of CCTV. As
noted we see this analysis as providing useful insights into the reasons proliferation of CCTV in
Australian public spaces has been relatively modest compared with the UK.
Open-Street CCTV in Australia: An Overview
As with the UK (Williams, 2003), closed circuit television was first introduced into Australia in
the mid 1960s, with use initially restricted to retail environments, sports stadiums and specialised
police surveillance operations. The early 1990s saw dramatic reductions in the cost of
equipment, and the local CCTV market expanded rapidly (LAACT, 1996: 3). Australia’s first
open-street CCTV system commenced operation in Perth, Western Australia, in July 1991. A
1996 national review by the ACT Standing Committee on Legal Affairs identified 13 ‘town
centre’ CCTV systems in operation. The number has since expanded to 33, with the Northern
Territory being the only Australian jurisdiction without CCTV surveillance in public spaces.
While systems were initially located in the town centres of capital cities, there has been a
noticeable trend towards public surveillance in regional, rural and suburban locations. It should
be noted however that systems are not evenly distributed across Australian States. Open-street
CCTV is disproportionately concentrated in New South Wales, which has eleven systems, and
its northern neighbour Queensland, which has ten (see Table 1).
T
OTAL CAPITAL REGIONAL
New South Wales 11 4 7
Queensland 10 2 8
Western Australia 4 2 2
Victoria 3 2 1
Tasmania 3 1 2
South Australia 1 1 0
Australian Capital Territory 1 1 0
Northern Territory 0 0 0
Total 33 13 20
Table1:
Number of Australian Open -Street CCTV Systems by State or Territory
(As at October 2002)
Current systems vary in size from small two camera record-only schemes through to Australia’s
largest installation in Perth, Western Australia, which consists of 105 cameras monitored by
three operators twenty-four hours a day. The complexity of management structures also varies.
Larger capital cities – such as Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane – tend to separate day-to-day
operations and policy functions. Smaller authorities tend to rely more on the efforts of an
individual. Operators are predominately drawn from private security firms, but police, local
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government employees and in some locations volunteers are also responsible for camera
monitoring (Wilson, forthcoming).
The relatively low number of open-street CCTV systems in Australia is certainly not due to
legislative impediments. No specific State or Territory legislation covers CCTV surveillance in
public areas. Overt surveillance, of which town centre CCTV systems are one form, has recently
been the subject of inquiry by law reform commissions in two Australian States (NSWLRC,
1997; 2001; VLRC, 2001). As a recent New South Wales Law Reform Commission
(NSWLRC) report noted: ‘there is very little to fetter the unrestricted use of overt surveillance,
other than codes which are adhered to voluntarily and lack sanctions for breach, or a patchwork
of common law remedies which are inapplicable in the vast majority of cases’ (NSWLRC,
2001: 150).
Funding for open-street CCTV in Australia predominantly comes from local authorities. Twenty
out of Australia’s thirty-three systems were established solely through local government
resources. The remaining thirteen were financed through a combination of private sources, State
government contributions and local government input. The ongoing operation of CCTV also
depends primarily on local government. Twenty-two systems rely exclusively on local authorities
for ongoing finance, while ten supplement this with some form of business levy. Three Australian
councils (Brisbane, Gold Coast and Logan) fund their operations entirely through a business
levy.
Until very recently, State governments have been marginal players in the establishment of CCTV.
They have provided funding for specific systems, but without any clear policy rationale. State
governments have also boasted little in the way of useful expertise for local governments
contemplating CCTV. The Australian situation stands in sharp contrast to that in the UK, where
there is strong central government support for CCTV, articulated most clearly through CCTV
Challenge competitions and substantial funding – by 1995 78% of the Home Office crime
prevention budget (Williams and Johnstone, 2000: 188-189).
While the picture has generally been that CCTV has been championed from the local level, there
are indications that the Australian scene is transforming and entering a period of increased State
government involvement. In the lead up to the 1999 Victorian election Steve Bracks, then leader
of the Labor opposition and now State Premier, pledged to boost the number of surveillance
cameras in Melbourne as part of a ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ platform
(
Herald Sun, 7/04/99: 15). In NSW a promised five million dollars towards the funding of
CCTV for towns in the west of the State was a key element of the opposition National Party’s
election platform in 2002 (
Weekend Liberal, 20/07/02: 3). Even representatives of the security
industry have noted ‘the increasing willingness of politicians using the implementation of
surveillance cameras as election carrots’ (Dolahenty, 1999: 16-17). However bold statements
by State politicians at election times have generally not yet resulted in policies of concerted and
sustained support for CCTV. Despite rhetorical flourishes, Queensland is the only Australian
State government to have emerged as an unabashed promoter of CCTV through a system of
ongoing funding comparable to that operated by the UK Home Office.
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In Queensland, state funding for CCTV in public space is becoming increasingly common. Since
1999 the Queensland State Government’s Department of Local Government and Planning has
administered a Security Improvement Program (SIP) offering funding for local government
security initiatives. The Queensland Premier’s Department has also recently released guidelines
for councils considering the installation of CCTV (2002). The SIP initiative is located within the
Queensland Government’s statewide crime prevention strategy
Building Safer Communities.
SIP grants offer councils up to 50% funding for the establishment of CPTED (Crime Prevention
Through Environmental Design) projects, and application guidelines specifically mention
‘surveillance equipment in malls and other public places’ (QDLGP, 2002: 6). While incentives
under the Queensland system are not nearly as lucrative as in Britain, councils are taking
advantage of the program. Three new systems – Cairns, Rockhampton and Logan – have been
established with the aid of State government funding. Additional systems aided by the funding
scheme are planned (ABC Regional News, 2003). Clearly, the Queensland State Government is
beginning to exert a measure of influence over the nature of local CCTV systems and is playing a
very active role in promoting future growth.
Australia’s most populous State, New South Wales, is also exhibiting increasing interest in
locally based surveillance systems. In contrast to Queensland, however, it has been wary about
making a general commitment to direct funding. Its main role has been to provide guidelines and
other forms of indirect supervision. As early as 1996 the NSW Police Service prepared
guidelines outlining community consultation procedures for the establishment of CCTV
(NSWLRC, 1997). In 1999 the NSW Premier’s Council on Crime Prevention established an
Inter-Departmental Committee on Closed Circuit Television (IDCCCTV). The Committee
included representatives of the Departments of Local Government, Transport, Urban Affairs and
Planning, Attorney General’s and the NSW Police Service. The specific intention was to exert a
greater degree of central control over the operation of CCTV (interview with Policy
Coordinator, NSW Police Service, 7 June 2002). The Committee oversaw the develo pment of
State government guidelines, released in 2000 and subsequently evaluated by private
consultants.
3 The NSW Police Service has also released its own policy stipulating that police are
neither to ‘fund nor operate equipment’ (NSWPS, 2002).
In jurisdictions other than Queensland, central governments have tended to commit funds to local
CCTV surveillance on an ‘ad hoc’ basis, in instances where perceived crime and disorder are
attracting intense media and public attention. In 1996, for example, the New South Wales
government contributed fifty percent of the installation cost ($A325,000) of a fourteen camera
CCTV system in the South West Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, as part of police attempts to
combat high profile street trafficking in heroin. Cabramatta had, and to some extent retains, the
reputation of Australia’s ‘heroin capital’. The area has been the subject of concentrated law
enforcement initiatives and sustained media attention, much of it negative. In the mid 1990s,
3
Crime Prevention Division, New South Wales Attorney General’s Department (2000) NSW Government
policy statement and guidelines for the establishment and implementation of closed circuit television in
public places
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/cpd.nsf/pages/cctv_index For evaluation see ARTD
Management and Research Consultants (2001)
Evaluation of the NSW Government Policy Statement and
Guidelines for Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) in Public Places – Final Report
http://www.agd.nsw.gov.au/cpd.nsf
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Cabramatta became the subject of a moral panic over ‘Asian criminality’ that fed into broader
political debates surrounding immigration and multiculturalism. Cabramatta thus became the
symbolic locus of State political efforts to combat a street heroin trade linked through media
reporting to ‘Asian Organized Crime’. These perceptions differed considerably from the social
reality of an ethnically heterogenous suburb (Maher
et al., 1997: 3). Nevertheless the system has
subsequently been expanded to 23 cameras, and is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a
week, by a private security contractor. Vision is also transmitted to the Cabramatta Police
Station (Fairfield City Council, 2001).
In Western Australia the State Government provided $A150 000 for the installation of a system
of nine cameras in the central area of the Perth suburb of Claremont, as part of ongoing WA
Police investigations of several high profile abductions and murders of young women. In 2000
the Police Task Force investigating these crimes informed the municipality that the cameras were
no longer required for its work. However the Town of Claremont opted to continue to fund the
system (Wilson and Sutton, 2003: 24). In May 2001 the Australian Capital Territory
government provided funds for a fifteen-camera system in the Civic area, one of Canberra’s
main entertainment precincts, after widespread media and public concerns about vandalism,
harassment, assaults, drunkenness, drug dealing and offensive behaviour. Cameras were installed
as a final element of a Safer City campaign that also included an increased police presence and
CPTED projects to improve natural surveillance.
4 In 1995 the South Australian government
contributed a third of the $A530 000 installation cost of a twelve-camera system to monitor
behaviour in Rundle Mall: a notorious ‘hotspot’ for antisocial behaviour in the State’s capital city.
Subsequent years have seen significant expansion in the size (now 33 cameras) and geographical
reach of this system. The Tasmanian government also has provided support for three town
centre systems – in Hobart, Launceston and Devonport – after concerns had been expressed
about crime and disorder (Wilson and Sutton, 2003: 26-29)
The Local Politics of CCTV
Whilst the preceding discussion has emphasized that while Australian governments have played
some role in funding CCTV systems, this has tended to be more on the basis of political
expediency than a UK-style coordinated central policy. In jurisdictions other than Queensland,
whether or not a system is installed has depended very much on local contingencies. From our
interviews alone, the nature of these contingencies was not always apparent. When asked why
their centres had opted for CCTV, most system managers commented that it was to combat
loosely defined ‘anti-social behaviour’. Closer analysis of documentation and other relevant
materials suggested however that in Australia, as in Britain, its installation has been inextricably
linked to attempts to rejuvenate town centres, stimulate local commerce and attract investment
(Reeve, 1998; Coleman and Sim, 1998; 2000).
The need to attract investment and visitors, and arrest decline, is clearly articulated in the Perth
4
It should be noted however that Canberra is administered directly by the Australian Capital Territory
government, and does not have a municipal council as do other Australian jurisdictions.
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CCTV Information Kit (2000). It provides the following background to the system:
The Central Business District was suffering a retail decline in the mid 1980s and
the best efforts of the Council to rejuvenate the area were often offset by
emotional stories in the media which generated an undesirable image of the city.
The formation of crime-control partnerships between local government and business to install
CCTV systems dovetails with broader neo-liberal strategies of responsibilisation (O’Malley,
1997; Garland, 2001). Economics also helps explain the critical role local business has played in
underwriting the installation and maintenance of many systems. Lismore, a northern New South
Wales coastal town with a population of 43 000 whose economy depends in part on tourism, is
a classic example. The main push for surveillance cameras emanated from the local Chamber of
Commerce. The Chamber’s concern was that perceptions of rampant crime in the central
commercial area were keeping shoppers away and damaging retail businesses. Even prior to the
City Council’s giving serious consideration to the issue, the Chamber of Commerce and the local
Rotary Club began a drive to raise funds for CCTV cameras. The Chamber remained actively
involved in the planning process, and when cameras were finally installed in 1999 it contributed
$A60 000: one-third of the total installation cost. Rotary West met a further third of installation
costs. Local businesses continue to support the ongoing funding of CCTV through a levy
imposed on properties (Interview with Building Manager, Lismore City Council, 28/08/02).
Lismore also demonstrates the ways business and politics tend to overlap in Australian local
government. Pursuit by councillors of vested economic interests often translates into a ‘law and
order’ impulse to exclude marginalized individuals or groups whose presence might undermine
their region’s capacity to attract consumers and investors. ‘Law and order’ rhetoric has
reverberated through the past decade of Australian politics (Hogg and Brown, 1998). This has
been no less true for local government politicians than their State and Federal counterparts. To
promise ratepayers a CCTV system is to demonstrate that Council is ‘tough on crime’. The
clearest example of this was the installation of the Brisbane’s CCTV system in 1992. In the run
up to mayoral elections, one candidate stood on a ‘law and order’ platform. CCTV formed part
of the candidate’s election promise and, following a successful campaign, it was implemented
with no examination of potential alternatives (Wilson and Sutton, 2003: 20).
Most Australian systems have been established with some level of political motivation, if less
overt than was the case in Brisbane. CCTV systems are a powerful indication to communities
that local government is doing something about crime. The political motivation to install CCTV
also results from competitiveness between towns. It is clear that for some regions of Australia,
having a CCTV system is now a symbol of municipal success. This is most notable in
Queensland, where town centre systems have spread up the coast, and there is clearly a strong
‘me too’ factor at play. In regional areas, a CCTV system can serve as a statement of the
community’s commitment to sustainability and growth, in the face of the ‘drift to the cities’ and
the ongoing discourse of rural decline in Australian politics (McManus and Pritchard, 2000: 4-
5).
Inter-regional competition, CCTV’s role as a signifier of progress and security, and the need for
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public mall and street-based retailers to vie for customers with large enclosed shopping centres
and other forms of ‘mass private space’ (Davis, 1990; White and Sutton, 1995) all provide
strong impetus for the expansion of systems. We should note however, that even our research,
which was based on the documentation of established schemes, disclosed evidence of resistance
to these trends. In several locations, authorities have rejected plans for CCTV. In 1999, a
feasibility study commissioned by Sydney’s Manly council and the local Chamber of Commerce
recommended against CCTV on the basis that such a system would not effectively address
alcohol related offending – the predominant concern in the area.
5 Another Sydney suburban
council, Waverly, rejected a proposal on the grounds of expense and the need to investigate
alternative strategies.
6 In Newcastle a scheme that had been mooted for at least five years was
shelved in favour of increased lighting and police presence. Such measures were suggested to be
more cost effective than a camera scheme anticipated to cost $A500,000 (
Newcastle Herald,
30/08/03: 8).
Ostensibly all of these rejections were for technical and financial reasons. However we suspect
that sentiments about CCTV go much deeper. To some extent this has been confirmed by
debates that followed the release of our summary report. One of our university media units
decided to accompany it with a press release provocatively headlined ‘Cameras Fail To Reduce
Crime’.
7 This attracted concerted attention from local, State and national print and broadcast
media (eg
Daily Telegraph, 10/5/03: 12; Herald Sun, 10/5/03: 17), and feedback from many
interested parties. A senior bureaucrat from a State crime prevention unit immediately contacted
one of us to protest about the release. An agreement that the authors would help draft guidelines
for open-street CCTV in Victoria was subsequently shelved as ‘the situation had changed’.
Against this, however, there was an enthusiastic response from many local government based
crime prevention and community safety officers. Numerous email and telephone requests for
copies of the report were received. Many of these officers were delighted to hear about alleged
problems with CCTV. This was because, as one commented, ‘we are getting a lot of pressure
from police and traders here for cameras’. There were also requests to address councillors
considering installing systems, presumably to help dissuade them from doing so.
8
What such feedback – and subsequent experience of one of the authors in conducting a
feasibility study for the Northern Territory town of Alice Springs – expose is the contested
nature of this phenomenon. Most officers charged with coordinating crime prevention and
community safety at the local level are drawn from community development and welfare
backgrounds. They are generally dedicated to programs that they see as attacking ‘root causes’
5
Manly Council (2000) Manly Crime Prevention Plan Part 1, 7-8
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/cpd.nsf/pages/cpplans_manly1
6
Waverly City Council (2001) Closed Circuit Television Surveillance Camera – Bondi Junction Report
812-5
, 10 July.
http://www.waverly.nsw.gov.au/council/meetings/2001Minutes/0107/CouncilReports/13_1.htm
7
The media release is available online
http://www.pso.adm.monash.edu.au/news/Story.asp?ID=980&SortType=4
. The original headline was
changed at the request of one of the authors as it misrepresented the findings of the report, which was that
available evidence failed to establish that cameras reduced crime, rather than conclusively establishing that
they did not.
8
Private telephone and email communications with the author.
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– for example deficits in education, welfare support and housing – and see video surveillance as
either irrelevant or unhelpful.
The request for the Alice Springs study came in a context where a group of retailers in the town
had been demanding the installation of security cameras in the central area, Todd Mall, for
several years (
Centralian Advocate, 25/1/02: 5). The town itself has a population of just 27
092, of whom a significant percentage (15%) are relatively disadvantaged indigenous Australians
(Alice Springs Town Council, 2000: 70). The Town Council had initially resisted calls for
cameras, arguing they would prove prohibitively expensive and that problems of security would
be better addressed through improved lighting and police presence (
Centralian Advocate,
8/1/02: 1). Following continued pressure from several retailers however, the Council had finally
agreed to commission a feasibility study (
Centralian Advocate, 25/1/02: 2).
During the consultancy local divisions over the CCTV issue became very apparent. Traders
were far from united, although several were extremely vocal and had cultivated a close
relationship with the major local newspaper, the
Centralian Advocate. The NT Police in Alice
Springs were unenthusiastic. Elected councillors were divided. Amongst council staff there was
little support, as a lighting strategy had recently been implemented and its effects were to still to
be determined. Moreover several were drawn from social and community work backgrounds,
and objected to the CCTV proposal on the grounds that it would discriminate against
disadvantaged members of the community and drain resources from social programs. The
feasibility study found CCTV would be expensive and alternative measures would be more
appropriate.
9 The proposal was subsequently defeated (Centralian Advocate, 18/07/03: 1).
Conclusion
The politics of CCTV in Australia has, by and large, remained embedded in localised concerns
about crime and disorder. This is not to say that the stories of Australia’s CCTV systems do not
reflect global patterns. As Girling, Loader and Sparks note ‘crime resonates in
both terms of the
local/global dialectic’ (2000: 9). So too has the spread of CCTV in Australia been a
combination of global and local concerns. Australian examples – Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide,
Melbourne and Sydney – could easily form the locus of discussions about surveillance and the
‘stranger society’, CCTV and the risk society or the securitisation and commodification of urban
space.
10 The politics of law and order too, is intimately imbricated with the spread of CCTV in
Australia. Nevertheless local contingencies continue to restrain the unbridled proliferation of
CCTV and its extension into a ‘fifth utility’ (Graham, 1998) along the lines of the English model.
Data in this paper confirm, then, that one level the expansion of open-street CCTV has been
underpinned by broad social transformations affecting late modern societies, and giving rise to
9
D. Wilson (2003) Todd Mall Closed Circuit Television Feasibility Study, Alice Springs: Alice Springs
Town Council.
http://www.alicesprings.nt.gov.au/council/pdf/CCTV_FEASIBILITY_Report.pdf
10
For an outline of theoretical approaches to closed circuit television see M. McCahill and C. Norris (2002)
Literature Review
, Working Paper No. 2, URBANEYE project, http://www.urbaneye.net
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what Lyon (1994; 2001) has termed ‘surveillance societies’. As Garland (1996; 2001) and
O’Malley (1999) point out, late modern societies, and Australia is no exception, now embrace
two seemingly contradictory models of crime control. On the one hand a new set of symbols has
emerged that evoke punitive and exclusionary emotions and which have an instinctive appeal to
many in a culture infused with insecurity. On the other hand a managerialist ethos based upon
economic reasoning and continual auditing and monitoring to ensure efficiency remains strong.
This ethos seeks to establish ‘what works’ and then uniformly apply these techniques (Garland,
2001: 188-190). The appeal of CCTV – with its promise of ever closer scrutiny of ‘the other’
and its capacity to generate almost infinite volumes of data – is that it straddles these seemingly
contradictory strands of late modern crime control. Despite all this, however, the spread of
open-street CCTV has been far less rapid in Australia than in the UK. We attribute this to two
interrelated factors.
The first is Australia’s federalist system of government. Because responsibility for police, courts
and corrections has been with States and Territories rather than with the national government,
the impetus for prevention has also tended to emanate from this ‘second tier’ (Sutton and
Cherney, 2002: 327). By definition this has reduced the capacity for the centre to promote
implementation of open-street CCTV in a highly coordinated way. With the possible exception
of Queensland, State and Territory funding for CCTV has been ad hoc and in response to
special circumstances.
The second is that this more dispersed and fragmented system of politics and administration
seems to have provided greater opportunities for resistance to closed circuit television. Such
resistance is by no means unique to Australia. As Norris and Armstrong (1999: 35) point out, in
the 1980s many UK local authorities remained either ideologically or financially opposed to
CCTV. Confronted with a Conservative administration committed to curbing public expenditure,
CCTV was an expense few local government authorities contemplated. This only changed in the
UK with the announcement of the CCTV Challenge Competition, which stimulated demand for
CCTV well beyond the number of schemes actually funded (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 36-
37). In Australia however the scene at the local level continues to be reminiscent of the UK in
the 1980s. Within local contexts CCTV continues to be contested with some success.
Much of the resistance comes from what Skogan (1988: 42-43), in his excellent review of
community based crime prevention in the US in the 70s and 80s, has termed the ‘insurgent’
approach to prevention. Local activists who embrace ‘insurgent’ philosophies tend to see the
causes of crime as lying in economic and social inequality. They strive to address it by changing
current distributions. Skogan contrasts them with what he terms ‘preservationists’: long term
residents, home owners, small business and others with an interest in preserving the status quo
and excluding any who might disrupt it.
The period of US history Skogan reviewed predated the widespread availability of open-street
CCTV technology. From Australian experience it seems clear, however, that such surveillance
techniques are likely to be favoured by ‘preservationists’. Up until now many local authorities
have tended to reject CCTV largely, we suspect, because employees responsible for
coordinating their crime prevention and community safety plans come from social and community
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development backgrounds, and are likely to favour more ‘insurgent’ approaches (Sutton, 1997).
Nevertheless, there are signs the Australian environment may be moving closer to a UK model
of CCTV incentives distributed from the political centre. Queensland has followed this direction,
and the State Premier has been quick to gain electoral mileage from funding CCTV, proclaiming
offenders will be caught and punished with ‘the full force of the law’ (
Sunday Mail, 23/02/03:
10). If other Australian jurisdictions adopt similar funding models the balance of power would be
tipped decisively in favour of ‘preservationists’, who favour hard technical measures. The
significance of local contexts, where CCTV is contested and alternative measures currently gain
momentum, would likely be eroded. The ‘surveillance revolution’ of the UK is not an inevitable
Australian future, however coordinated funding from the centre would make it probable.
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