Press Clippings
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Mr Lawrenson and the tobacco industry describe BUGA UP as nuisance value, the campaign is certainly being felt. Australian Posters this year will spend $250,000 on replacing graffiti-damaged hoardings.
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In Victoria. BUGA UP activists are mostly professionals. A doctor's wife with whom I spoke had sprayed about 300 hoardings in the eastern suburbs. "I was doing a lot of study at the time," she said. "When I could not think I would go out and do a few billboards."
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The outdoor advertising industry is totally insensitive to the environment. It has no compunction whatsoever about ruthlessly marring our beautiful countryside with ugly billboards and hoardings.
While the common litterbug is an ignorant slob, these professional litterers know exactly what they are doing. It is simply the old. story of monetary gain being all that matters.
Perhaps before the BUGA UP people can be accused of being vandals it needs to be determined if it is possible to vandalise that which is already a form of vandalism in itself.
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Supporters have been asked to give talks in schools. One doctor said he spoke to a school group about human relations, starting with a talk on attitudes towards advertising, making decisions as to the worth of the advertising and then showing slides of BUGA UP's work to illustrate how advertisers could create a false image.
He says BUGA UP's work can only be doing good for the community.
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Membership is gained merely by picking up a spray can and. when done signing the group's increasingly well-know initials.
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Aged 42, BUGA UP activist Snow calls himself a self-employed graphic artist, a description which seems to encompass both his profession and his outside interests.
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Dr Zdenkowski told the Newcastle Morning Herald last night that he had committed the offence because of the "misleading nature of the advertising". "The advertisement associates a tough, virile he-man with smoking tobacco, which is plainly false," Dr Zdenkowski said.
Other advertisements which associated smoking with glamour sophistication and success were just as misleading.
"The indirect effect is that it causes people to feel inadequate if they do not smoke," Dr Zdenkowski said.
The considerable suffering, morbidity and mortality associated with tobacco usage that he had seen as a medical practitioner prompted him to deface the advertisement.
Dr Zdenkowski said he felt frustrated by the power of the tobacco lobby in influencing Government bodies to maintain cigarette advertising, even in the face of appeals by the Australian Medical Association and the National Heart Foundation.
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Frank Watters, gallery owner of East Sydney, said that graffiti was "the art of protest". He said that the advertising poster in this case, with its graffiti superimposed, could be described as an art in that sense.
After considering their verdict for three hours, the jury found them guilty.
Before announcing sentence, Judge Loveday told the defendants he had great sympathy for anyone campaigning against "the evil of cigarette smoking". But he said he could not act out of sympathy, but had to uphold the law.
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She pleaded not guilty to the charge of having defaced the poster and said she felt justified in adding her own health messages, because the sign deliberately set out to "create new addicts". "I did not deface the poster," she said. "I improved it. I added essential information in the interests of public health and, in particular, our children. "When you see people suffering and dying quite unnecessarily from disease related to smoking you become outraged. I just became angrier and angrier at seeing this particular poster each day, I'd watch kids pass at and get more angry".
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BILLBOARD defacers are getting bolder. A colleague waiting at a Railway Square bus stop at 6.30 pm this week saw a man saunter up to a row of billboards.
Selecting a cigarette advertisement as his target, he scrambled on to a fence. Balancing carefully, he drew some cans of spray paint from his voluminous trousers and jacket and went to work, under the gaze of a crowd at the bus stop and many passers-by. He climbed down, and with no furtiveness, added a few choice words to a nearby beer advertisement, added a postscript to the cigarette billboard, and strolled away scot-free.
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The newsagent claimed he saw five men emerge from a car parked in the vicinity of a billboard, three of the men disappear from view while the others graffitied, and later the five men return to the car. He reported the incident to the police who arrived before the car had left. The five men had in their possession BUGA UP catalogues, spray cans labeled "BUGA UP", extension poles used to graffiti on high rise billboards and a two-way radio. The men admitted an interest in the BUGA UP group.
The magistrate ruled there was not enough prima facie evidence for a case and told the defendants "you can have your spray cans back now".
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"I went to Australian Posters (one of Australia's largest outdoor advertising space contractors) two years ago and asked them to stop taking contracts for cigarette ads. They told me I didn't know the first thing about advertising. Well, I said, I'm learning.
"Had Australian Posters agreed, there would not have been a group like Buga Up, moving as it has done into ads like soft drinks, cars, appliances and alcohol, even political comment."
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Snow conducted his own lengthy defence and produced photographic evidence.
In summing up he said he didn't like being convicted for an alcohol graffiti because he specialised in tobacco.
"I've got my reputation to uphold" he said.
An extremely patient magistrate Riedel said, "You've been given more than a fair go..."
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A giant tobacco company is so concerned at the anti-smoking lobby that it has held the final of a big promotional campaign in "secret."
The occasion was the presentation of awards in $50,000 Marlboro Man competition.
Fewer than 50 people at Sydney's Lone Star Café came to see Bill Hughes, a rodeo contestant from Warwick, Queensland, receive $25,000 first prize money.
The "crowd" included two off-duty policemen invited along to ensure no spray-can holders from B.U.G.A.U.P. disrupted proceedings.
B.U.G.A.U.P. -- Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions -- is estimated to cost cigarette and alcohol manufacturers $250,000 a year by defacing advertising posters.
It stuck up signs announcing its own candidate for the Mr Marlboro crown -- Mr Frank C, of Darlinghurst, described as a lifetime smoker who, after a tracheotomy, now smokes through a hole in his neck.
Neither Mr C nor representatives from B.U.G.A.U.P. turned up.
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The public support is staggering. People see BUGAUP as socially responsible even while the law is being broken. People can see the contradiction in alcohol and tobacco consumption, and I think they appreciate the humour that Bugaup tries to produce. There is a bit of the Ned Kelly ethic in every Australian that supports the underdog. Bugaup are out there actually doing what normal people only fantasise about.
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Thousands saw three men leisurely defacing a giant cigarette billboard high on the roof of a five storey building at North Sydney -- but did nothing. The three men, members of the loose-knit group opposed to cigarette and liquor advertising BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists
Against Unhealthy Promotion) spent an hour working on the 5m x 15m Marlboro sign at the main intersection at Crows Nest.
The three men gained access to the roof simply by walking in the front door on the afternoon of Christmas Eve and catching the lift. Using three litres of paint -- and waiting for the first coat to dry - they were watched by hundreds of office workers having Christmas parties, and would have been seen by thousands of motorists and pedestrians. Nobody took any action.
Although BUGA-UP regularly daub their slogans on roadside hoardings, this was the first big rooftop billboard they have touched..
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"People might say that advertising is something we have to live with," says Snow.
"Well, this is the way I live with it. It is public space, we should be allowed to put an alternate view. We challenge their (advertisers) right to having that space."