NEWS
An exclusive Independent survey of how the Brisbane City Council’s official cleat appears in public shows that Team Quirk’s copycat version sits right in the middle of the dimensions of the yellow and blue blocks used on the official branding image.
Our survey makes a mockery of any piece of tricky, sneaky, fancy legal footwork that Graham Quirk relies on (not that he's ever been prepared to tell us) to make his bold claim that the LNP does not use the council cleat. With that claim comes the unspoken assumption that your average Brisbane person could tell the difference, which is an absolute nonsense.
The council’s CEO Colin Jensen told The Independent last year that he had examined Team Quirk political material from 2012 and while the colours were the same - we had plenty of hardcopy evidence of that anyway - he couldn’t defend the council’s intellectual property because the dimensions of the blocks Team Quirk were not "exactly the same". We asked for those dimensions but Mr Jensen refused or forgot to supply them.
But does it matter? Even if somewhere deep in the administrative bowels of City Hall, guidelines do indeed exist as to what the real city council "cleat" dimensions are, Mr Jensen has done a very poor job in enforcing them.
For our exclusive investigation we chose the Valley mall and its immediate environs, right in the heart of LNP councillor Vicki Howard’s Central ward. It's probably safe to say that no candidate used the copycat council cleat in 2012 more than just-a-humble-citizen-at-the-time Vicki Howard.
From the back of buses, to bus timetable signs, to safe precinct signs, to leaflets on what’s happening locally, to rubbish bins, the blue and yellow blocks on the council’s official cleat vary in dimensions from short and fat, to square, to slightly elongated, to very tall and thin. And Graham Quirk and his Team Quirk candidates would know that more than anyone.
So when the LNP/Team Quirk print political election material with blocks of colour exactly the same as the council cleat - as admitted by Mr Jensen - when they put them down the left-hand-side of political documents exactly where the official cleat goes and when no reasonable person could possibly tell any real difference, then we say they’ve used the council cleat. If it looks like the cleat, if it’s positioned like the cleat, if it has alternating blocks of yellow and blue like the cleat, then it’s the cleat!
It’s why we believe Lord Mayor Quirk lied to this paper – and you, its readers – several years ago when he said Team Quirk candidates didn’t use the cleat in 2012. They most certainly did. As they are again now.
But let’s put this nonsense to bed once and for all with the one final public example of the official council cleat that The Independent thinks is an absolute doozey that perfectly sums up the con that Team Quirk is perpetrating on the public.
Pasted on the window of one entertainment Valley mall venue is a very serious council edict (see right) on the importance of following council health rules about food standards. It has the tallest, skinniest blocks this paper has ever seen.
The author was none other than that brave defender of the council's intellectual property and branding image, Colin Jensen, and we are absolutely confident that he seriously believed the points he was making were being reinforced in the venue owner’s mind by the use of the council’s official cleat.
Don Gordon-Brown
