My Macquarie dictionary defines graffiti as “drawings or words, sometimes obscene, sometimes political, etc, written on public walls”.

My own definition is somewhat broader, and while like many of you I see little merit in much of the artless crud that further blights the landscape across the Sunshine Coast, it is often the canvasses themselves that I find most offensive.

Take, for example, the Sunshine Motorway stretch between Maroochydore Road and the Maroochy River.

Adequate natural buffers were never afforded between residential development and a dedicated future road corridor, so yet another Berlin wall has been constructed to protect adjoining houses from the constant hum of traffic.

The tree canopy which allowed birds safe migration north-south is gone and the landscaping done to retain earthwork banks is never going to effectively replace it.

With the latest Red List indicating 788 Australian plants, animals and birds face extinction, instead of applauding a “Can Do” action man with a bucket of mission-brown paint, we should be getting very angry about the role planning and infrastructure roll-out is playing in destroying what’s left of our coastal environment.

Main Roads has become quite arty in some areas around Brisbane and on the Gold Coast, replicating, no doubt at great expense, the former landscape in murals on “noise walls”.

Here on the Coast the look is more the concrete relief style with leaf motifs. They don’t hide though the fundamental planning flaws that created their need.

At least the spray-canned chaos of the graffiti artist is honest.

At Pacific Paradise, where the motorway bypass was expected to return the village to the community, road builders have been at it again.

A wonderful canopy of paper barks that shielded high-density housing and provided a canopy for a daily chorus of birdlife has been denuded to allow for a re-alignment to provide better access to a school and shopping centre and to fix the Mudjimba Road intersection disaster.

How this sort of vandalism can continue to be perpetrated in 2008 is beyond me. Will a truncated bit of natural vegetation replace this state-sanctioned destruction or will another wall be constructed?

Engineers build things and have a tendency to destroy others in the process.

“We need road, tree must go” is a mentality that has no place in this century and needs to be controlled by other agencies.

A bit of artwork, either by a street artist or one commissioned by Main Roads, makes not one iota of difference to species whose chances of survival grow slimmer with the daily loss of precious remnant vegetation.

Sunshine Coast Council has identified the dangers of uncoordinated infrastructure roll-out with no communication between state government departments and inadequate attention being shown to the natural environment.

It needs to demand a place at the table to discuss with state government just what sort of future we can really expect.

Council’s growth management position paper, which accurately reflects the views most of us have about the type of place we aspire to live in, will be a meaningless document if the “vandaleers” continue to have free rein.

It is a given that if we allow the so-called demands of growth to hold sway in every debate, what we love about this place will be gone in the blink of an eye.

We can get very worked up about juvenile expressions of rebellion on kilometres of concrete walls.

It is more than time to direct our anger at what created the walls in the first place and to question whether we really think that is how we want our tax dollars to be spent.

Equally, how is heavily engineered metal signage that springs up in parks and foreshore areas proclaiming the wonders of another state government spending initiative – with our money – any less offensive than the free-form artwork of a section of our youth?

These permanent reminders of state are little more than fixed advertising ahead of the next electoral cycle and should be banned.

This nonsense angers me more deeply than anything I’ve ever seen on a concrete wall.

Having said that, if you want to paint, get yourself and easel and some butcher’s paper. Put on an exhibition if you want anyone else to look at it.

Elsewhere I’d prefer to be looking at as much of our precious natural world as we can possibly defend.