Melbourne ratepayers will be slugged more than $10,000 to clean a statue of King George V which was beheaded and covered in red paint in another attack by anti-colonial activists.

The statue in Kings Domain on Linlithgow Avenue was targeted between Sunday evening and the early hours of the King’s Birthday public holiday on Monday.

The holiday marked King Charles III’s birthday and was celebrated in Victoria and most other states.

A video posted to social media on Monday showed a person wearing hi-vis clothing and a headlamp using a mechanical saw to hack off the head, which topples and rolls to the ground.

The City of Melbourne’s deputy lord mayor Nicholas Reece said the vandalism was the latest act in a reprehensible trend and vowed the statue would be restored.

“The cleanup alone is about $10,000 and that’s before we get to the cost of repairing and reinstating the statue - this is ratepayers’ money we’re talking about here,” Reece told ABC radio on Tuesday.

“We cannot allow statues to be decapitated or chopped down like this, and that then becomes a trigger for them being removed.

“That’s not the way we do it in Melbourne.

“The red paint, the decapitating - that’s an act of violence.”

Other statues have been targeted by vandals this year, including a statue of Captain James Cook that was cut off at the ankles in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens on February 27.

-with AAP