Cr Hamling used to take his children to the skate park, which is a popular place for families, and was disturbed to find some graffiti with swear words and racial slurs spray painted onto the concrete.

“I only noticed it last week as I was driving past,” Cr Hamling said. 

“If we can identify people doing it, we can get in touch with their parents and they can clean it up.

“Council is going to have to remove this [graffiti] and that’s going to cost money from the ratepayers.” 

Cr Hamling said surveillance could be installed as a deterrence and to catch people in action.

“If we do catch someone doing it and they are writing disgusting graffiti, I’d like to see them charged,” he said.

Cr Hamling raised the issue at the Orange City Council meeting last Tuesday.

“There’s going to be a report come back to us, obviously we need to get the legal [advice] to see if we can do it or if we can’t,” he said.

“I’d like a pretty quick solution to this because why should people have to put up with this.”

Among the participants who saw the graffiti on Sunday was skateboarder David Birks, who said he sometimes brought his children to the skate park and agreed that CCTV would be a good thing.

He said some of the writing should not be seen by children and he was also concerned by littering and smashing glass on the ground, which was particularly dangerous for skate park users.