Regular readers of the News Desk will recall my 2005 run-in with the Western Australian Police, after I innocently took a photograph of the Perth Central Railway Station. I was accused of compromising national security and asked to ‘move on’.

Well it seems the terrorist threat has spread to Melbourne’s Southgate Shopping Centre. The management of Southgate have erected ‘No Camera’ signs throughout the building and promenade and security guards have allegedly been asking people to delete images from their cameras (which people have refused to do).

Southgate is a small shopping centre mostly filled with restaurants. Attached is a promenade that runs parallel to the Yarra River. The centre is an important tourist precinct in Melbourne, so a move such as this is unlikely to win the city praise from visitors.

Here is what Southgate looks like up-close:

Both the Prime Minister and Victorian Attorney-General have described the ban as ‘over the top’.

Lorraine Peck, a spokesman for the shopping centre told ABC News “We manage over 250 shopping centres for various clients, both institutional and private clients and due to the heightened sense of security for all public places, we’ve decided to be proactive and to ban photography in all of our centres, not just Southgate”.

Apparently, they were concerned about people taking ‘suspicious’ photos. Southgate property manager Kathy Barrance told the Herald-Sun “We’ve had a couple of incidents of tourists taking photos of obscure things and they were approached by security and asked to stop taking photos. It was just the façades of buildings, things that would be of no interest to put in a photo album”.

Um, who are they to decide what is interesting material for a photo album?

According to Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls, there is no law in Victoria that prohibits photography in public places. Legally, there is nothing that the Southgate Centre can do to enforce their ban.

In any case, modern digital cameras make such a ban completely impossible. Cameras are now routinely built into mobile phones and ‘stand-alone’ digital cameras are already becoming quite small. Furthermore, there are literally hundreds of photographs of Southgate on the internet already (see Flickr for example). One can even download satellite images from Google Maps.

One should not forget that every centimetre of Southgate is under constant video surveillance whilst tourists are threatened by security guards for photographing without the permission of management. Does the requirement for permission flow in the other direction?

This exercise has done nothing but demonstrate how unreasonable Southgate management is.

Post Script:

On Friday 28 July, the signs prohibiting photography were quietly removed from the precinct. Southgate management has instead issued a new Photography Policy that prohibits ‘inappropriate photography’, whatever that is. The policy is a corporate face-saving exercise where an apology would have been sufficient. In any case, I hope that security guards will no longer harass innocent photographers in future.