Have you ever heard of a car thief being required to pay for the damage to or loss of a car? Yet it is likely that the cost to insurers of paying out on stolen cars adds a couple of hundred dollars to vehicle insurance premiums.

Few people have the determination and the means of Mr McCloy to pursue a graffiti vandal, and so far he's offered a $1000 reward and, later, security film of a fellow in a black mask who seems likely to know something about the damage inflicted one night last month on the Telstra building on the corner of Darby and Hunter streets in Newcastle. I'll be surprised if Mr McCloy hasn't garnered some information about the DOS graffiti tag and its perpetrator.

Mr McCloy, as he says, wants to run the vandal through the courts to force him to pay for removing the graffiti and as a warning to others, and if that's in the criminal courts the vandal may get a free run courtesy of Legal Aid.

Getting a court to order the vandal to pay for the damage may be harder than Mr McCloy realises, because a court may be reluctant to impose such an order on someone who has no means to pay, and alternatively Mr McCloy may seek compensation through a Small Claims court.

All this assumes that the perpetrator is an adult, because if he or she is below the age of 18 there's no hope.

Still, even with a court order for compensation, Mr McCloy and therefore you and me are up against it. The vandal refuses to pay, and Mr McCloy uses the court order to seek to garnishee the vandal's wages, but if the vandal is on a social security payment there can be no garnishee. At least not by Mr McCloy or anyone other than Centrelink, which is happy to impose its own garnishee on the money it pays to recover money owed to it.

Government looks after itself but does little for its good citizens. The state government, for example, gives its State Debt Recovery Office all sorts of persuasive powers to recover fines and court costs owed to it, and cancelling a driver's licence and vehicle registrations are just two of those. It won't do that for court orders in your favour.

Another option for McCloy is to have the sheriff seize goods owned by the vandal to cover the total of the court order, but those goods may well not yield enough at a bailiff's auction.

That won't bother Mr McCloy, who will certainly be spending much more on the pursuit of the vandal than he can ever hope to recover, and money is not his goal. He wants to demonstrate that vandals are not free to inflict their damage, that there is a price to pay, that they are responsible for their actions.

Revenge, a few will say, persecution of the poor, victimisation of the vulnerable, oppression of a minority. Some will say Mr McCloy, and you and me, need to try harder to understand subcultures, to appreciate that street art doesn't have to be pretty or permitted.

These people are unlikely to have been the victim of those they seek to protect.

Insurance will pay, they say, as if the onus is on us all to insure our property against vandals and thieves, as if those who are not insured forfeit their right to be compensated by those who damage or steal their property. It is as if the availability of insurance frees the vandal and thief of liability for damage and loss.

What insurance does mean is that all those insured share the cost of the damage and loss, and one reason insurers don't seek to recover that cost from the criminal is the great difficulty of doing so. Sometimes our systems do more to protect the perpetrators than the victims.

Some will say that those who are caught and dealt with by the courts have paid for their crime, but the fact is that very few will pay for the damage and loss. The criminal gets the bond, we get the bill.

Can anything be done?

Giving the State Debt Recovery Office the power and the task of enforcing court orders for restitution for victims would be a big step forward for all property owners.

And several of Canada's provinces have a law that would protect us from the poor parenting of people whose "good boy at heart" makes up a big proportion of those who steal and burn our cars, who graffiti our property. Their Parental Responsibility Act allows a small claims court to order the parents or guardians to compensate property owners for damage or loss caused intentionally by minors.

The parents can avoid this liability if they can show they were exercising reasonable supervision over the minor at the time and that they tried to stop the minor damaging or stealing other people's property.

What's not to like about that?

And a round of applause, please, for Jeff McCloy.