In Coast goes from green to greedy in the Sydney Morning Herald Elizabeth Farrelly says that Australia's

Coastal towns, even those as sweetly self-conscious as Noosa, suffer from a single organising principle: water. Nothing else figures - church, square, town hall, market, windmill. Only water, which is to say, money. Water makes a town self-arrange like iron-filings along a magnet, its streets pervaded by a palpable straining for view, proximity or access. Architecture is tyrannised by it and those not so blessed are permanently blighted by its absence.It's as though water is the one common value remaining. And it has remade our coast, one of the longest and loveliest littorals in the world, into an encircling crust of suburban gentility.

perhaps it’s just that, by the beach, there’s only one value: view. And that translates as money, and you either have it or you don’t And if you have it, you’re in and if you don’t, you can bugger off.

The built environment of the coastal town--eg., Victor Harbor in South Australia--- is ugly, seedy and neglected. Beauty is in nature not the built environment and with the focus is on the natural environment--the sea--the new buildings are dreary. It's bad architecture that is tarted up by developers. The two agendas – sustainability and development---are opposed rather than coincide.