OUR SAY
The City Hall bureaucrats charged with upholding Brisbane City Council policy that protects the public branding of council materials, services, and activities appear to have given their LNP political masters the green light to trick voters again.
And it means the widespread use by LNP candidates in BCC wards of a copycat council "cleat" at the 2012 poll looks like being repeated in the lead-up to the 2016 mayoral and council election. We believe it will be another attempt by the LNP to wrap all of its candidates, from Lord Mayor down, in the cloak and authority of incumbency.
The "cleat" is the distinctive blue and gold design adorning materials officially published or created by the BCC. It usually runs down the left-hand side of printed BCC materials or signs.In 2012 LNP candidates widely used what we believe any reasonable person would say was an identical design on their party political material and signs.
Yet the top council bureaucrat, Brisbane City Council CEO Colin Jensen, has declared he can do nothing to stop political candidates using blocks of identical gold and blue colours down the left-hand side of election material – just as the city council’s cleat is used.
According to answers from Mr Jensen to questions posed by The Independent, if the dimensions of the LNP cleat "do not conform" with the "specified design dimensions" laid down for the council cleat then council has no authority to stop "other organisations" from mimicking official BCC-endorsed material.
In asking whether council bureaucrats had ever "demanded, requested or suggested" that the LNP and Team Quirk stop using the council’s intellectual property, the three-paragraph response was:
"Brisbane City Council’s corporate branding includes a cleat with specified design dimensions.
"The dimensions of other designs used in non-council political campaign materials during the 2012 election did not conform to the dimensions of council cleat.
"Council has no authority to prevent other organisations from using the same colours with a similar design."
Mr Jensen did not answer follow-up questions seeking the specified dimensions for the council cleat, how many pieces of Team Quirk electioneering material were inspected to come to the conclusion that they were of a different dimension, and what were the dimensions of Team Quirk material that came closest to being the same dimensions as the council cleat.
The Independent specifically directed the first batch of questions to the office of Mr Jensen as CEO. Unfortunately, they came back from one of the Lord Mayor’s media spin-doctors who requested that the answers be attributed to "a council spokesperson".
We would understand completely if Mr Jensen did not want to put his name to those answers. Indeed, maybe he had no input into those responses and they were taken over by his political masters who have plenty of reasons to obscure and deflect over what we believe is the cleat’s misuse.
This paper’s three-year-plus campaign to make Team Quirk candidates come clean on their disgraceful use of the copycat cleat has always been a political one anyway. We’ll leave it to intellectual property academics to argue whether the council bureaucrats have done everything they could or should to protect the council’s ubiquitous and well-known (plus ratepayer-funded) brand.
But what is indisputable is that the LNP’s Team Quirk cynically and underhandedly copied the council cleat to give them an unfair and undeserved advantage at the 2012 poll. Any political academic worth their salt could explain the advantage the LNP gained by creating the impression its candidates had some form of official council backing. Team Quirk became Council Team Quirk.
We’re perfectly in our rights to say they use the cleat because for three long years Lord Mayor Quirk has refused to tell us how their design differed sufficiently from the official council cleat so that any reasonable person could tell them apart.
Indeed, the BCC CEO may have unwittingly let the cat two-thirds out of the bag. His answer, sanitised by Lord Mayoral staffers as coming from "a spokesperson", concedes the colours on the blocks are the same, as we’ve always known. Where the blocks were placed are the same. Our eyes told us that too.
We’re then left only with x and y arguments. If the width-to-height ratio of the blocks of colour used by Team Quirk was deliberately altered by a millimetre to cater to some legal flimflam yet still trick voters’ eyes then, as we’ve constantly argued, that would be even more underhanded, more tricky, more sneaky, more devious, more politically dishonest than if they’d just copied the BCC cleat in the first place.
So take a long hard look at the two LNP politicians below. They expect Brisbane ratepayers to always do the right thing and abide by council bylaws and regulation for the common good. Yet along with other Team Quirk candidates, we believe they have flouted council policy that forbids the use of the BCC cleat for selfish gain.
If they’re not courageous enough and open enough to admit a mistake and promise not to repeat it and scrap all materials bearing the cleat, this newspaper believes they do not deserve to be re-elected.
Footpath signs used by Team Quirk at the 2012 council elections. Lord Mayor Quirk and Vicki Howard have for three long years refused to answer basic questions over their use of the copycat council cleat.
