Campaign trail: The SDLP has called for an overhaul of sectarian and hate-crime legislation in order to ban graffiti and flags from publicly-owned property.
Mr Durkan also called for a total ban on the flying of the British flag on public buildings and also claimed that the police and local authorities were failing to enforce the existing anti-sectarian legislation.
At the SDLP's daily election briefing in Belfast yesterday morning, Mr Durkan said the problem of sectarianism was "getting worse".
"Five and a half years of stop-go politics has heightened the tensions and deepened the divisions between us," he said. "It is not enough to share power, we need to share our streets."
The SDLP was "determined to ensure that no public property can be used as a prop for sectarian aggression or assumptions", he added. "That is why we want the law changed to ban the Union Jack from public buildings until we get cross-community agreement on how national symbols should be used."
He also reiterated the party's call for a public inquiry into the murder of Robert Hamill, the young Catholic who was beaten to death by a loyalist mob in April 1997 in Portadown, just yards away from an RUC patrol.
Other proposals outlined yesterday by the party included laws banning sectarian chants at football matches, preventing bands which promote hate speech from parading and targeting sectarian hate sites on the Internet. The SDLP also called for the establishment of a Good Relations Commission to promote better relations among communities, and a monitoring system for sectarian offences.
Mr Durkan said new legislation to target hate crimes, announced by Northern Secretary, Mr Paul Murphy at last month's British Labour Party conference, "does not go far enough".
The proposed legislation provides for stiffer jail sentences for sectarian-motivated crime. Mr Durkan claimed it was "a recycling of a pledge made two party conferences ago by John Reid".
Mr Durkan said there needed to be "more effective prosecution" of sectarian crime, with co-operation between police and local authorities to tackle the problem of sectarian flags and graffiti. We have a situation too often where public authorities whose properties are used to display these symbols, fail to remove them," he said. "They cannot continue to hide behind the threat to workers."
Mr Durkan said he had been told by his own local authority in Co Derry that it only removed graffiti when it was personal because of threats to workers.
Mr Martin Wilson, a local SDLP councillor in Larne, said he knows through personal experience that the police do not intervene to remove sectarian symbols from public property.
According to Mr Wilson, loyalist supporters attempted to erect a UFF flag outside his house in mid-2001. "The police would not act and it took me to confront them before the police intervened," he said. "As a result, my house was pipe-bombed."