Steve Price: Lord Mayor Nick Reece has nothing to celebrate after 100 days in top job
Lord Mayor Nick Reece has spent almost a decade on council and 100 days in the top job, but Melbourne’s CBD remains a graffiti-smeared homeless haven with no-go zones resembling the bad old days of New York.
Opinion
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Nicholas Reece the Lord Mayor of Melbourne has been on city council for almost ten years and in the top job since last November.
He desperately needs all our help to make Melbourne great again an ambition we should all have.
Melbourne’s decline from a once globally acclaimed liveable city that today trails every capital city in Australia as a place to live needs to be fixed.
We are propped up by major events led by the Australian Open tennis and the grand prix which are magnificent marketing opportunities for Melbourne, but our CBD is a graffiti smeared haven for homeless people with no-go zones resembling the bad old days of New York. Let’s get to work.
Reece was elected Lord Mayor last November on the slogan (he) gets good done. Now it’s time to ask what all of us can do to help him get anything done to improve things.
Four months in – nearing 100 days in charge — you’d struggle to name one thing Reece has done to improve Melbourne.
To be fair to Reece the Covid years hollowed out our once great capital but 2020 and 2021 are now three years behind us. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and throw rocks at what’s not happened when all we really want is old Melbourne back. I want to be able to drive into the city find a park and quickly pick up few things and leave.
Capp and Reece made the disastrous decision-when the hated Daniel Andrews had us locked up- not to clean up Melbourne but to carpet bomb the Hoddle grid and near-by residential suburbs with un-necessary bike lanes at an eye watering cost. During the mayoral campaign late last year Reece tried to wipe his hands of that greenie inspired expensive mistake.
I agree with him on that but let’s get started Nick and bring in the bulldozers and repair the traffic atrocity that is Exhibition St for a start. Stop pandering to the leftie bike lobby that are louder than they are large.
As you promised fix pinch points. If there has been any progress on the traffic-killing bicycle lanes, I’ve missed it and typically when politicians – even lowly local ones – make grand sweeping promises during election campaigns it pays to check on their progress. A walk through the city on Wednesday showed me no progress on that front.
Saying we got it wrong is hard, but Melbourne is strangled by these things and businesses especially our restaurant and café sector need to be able to operate with suppliers. Forget pinch points and the pushback you’ll get from Spring St just do it and remind us of what it was like to park in town.
You also need to rethink selling off that carpark in Little Collins St to a Sydney hospitality giant. That end of town needs off-street parking, and you sold it cheap to a maybe-one-day-whenever complex of bars, restaurants and coffee shops that will destroy small traders at that end of town. Selling assets to build your monuments to your predecessor is not on.
The public would truly back you Lord Mayor if you dropped some of council’s vanity projects and obsession with thinking a city council at the bottom of the world can influence the global climate by overlaying net zero on everything you do.
For a start, drop the money draining dream of turning the northern banks of the Yarra River into something called Greenline. This was a Sally Capp vanity project costed at $315m to install pathways, boardwalks and art works so far costing $25m without any construction taking place.
As reported in the Herald Sun this week Greenline has become a money pit for consultants including a recent contract signed for a “cultural curatorial framework consultancy.” Can anyone tell me what that is beyond some vague promise to promote artworks in collaboration with the traditional owners.
If possible, it gets worse a 450-metre section of Birrarung Marr boarded up for boardwalk works due to be finished late last year hasn’t progressed because council can’t get a permit from Melbourne Water because they fear in might cause flooding.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Then during the campaign there was the promise to give Docklands its own Little India. Who exactly wants this to happen is unclear, but council has budgeted $22.6m to make it happen along with improvements to Chinatown. The election promise – presumably to duchess the Indian vote — includes $10mfor street art signage and cultural events costed at $250,000 a year from the council budget.
I’m betting Little India is still a marketing idea that might or might not happen. If it’s a goer Nick get the Indian community to pay for it like the Lygon St traders did back in the sixties.
A big headline idea of team Reece was floated to neutralise the obvious concerns of people not willing to visit Melbourne because of street crime and homelessness. We all support that idea but where are these thirty officers you promised and their stab proof vests.
Victoria Police have indicated they have no resources to help manage this idea so get the State Government to intervene and guarantee support, double the number Lord Mayor and make the security highly visible.
To be fair to Nick Reece and his predecessor they were handed control of Melbourne during Covid and saddled with the expensive state government Metro Tunnel project that’s late and over Budget by nearly a billion dollars. Construction has seen the city square, Federation square and surrounding sites boarded up for years turning central Melbourne into an ugly construction site.
In Reece’s 100-day interview in these pages last weekend he tossed up another old promise about something he called the Melbourne 3000 board to advise him on what to do to get good done This voluntary outfit includes media personality Eddie McGuire and restaurateur Chris Lucas.
If I were Nick Reece, I’d just let them run the joint they’d at least get something done.
It’s easy to throw rocks from the sidelines but unless we point out reality versus spin, action versus hope, and offer our support to get Melbourne back on track it will get worse.
Let’s get stuck in.
Dislikes
Premier Jacinta’s pledge to turn Victoria into the townhouse capital of Australia.
Labor slamming Peter Dutton’s property investments as something negative isn’t he and his Dad just living the Australian dream.
An entire state government department forced out of its Richmond office by customers of the heroin injecting facility.
Likes
Finally the Airport rail link getting Canberra’s attention ahead of the SRL
Huge turnout at Thursday’s farewell for 3AW legend Phil Brady in Kew.
An MCG statue for another legend Jim Stynes.
Originally published as Steve Price: Lord Mayor Nick Reece has nothing to celebrate after 100 days in top job
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