Steve Price: Muppet City Council on full display in Melbourne
This week’s desperate promises from Melbourne’s mayoral hopefuls prove these suburban attention seekers don’t get that those they represent just want a clean city they can be happy in.
Opinion
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Muppet City Council was on full display this week as we enter the October vote for every local council in the state – bar one – by postal ballot.
Is there anything more useless than local councils who believe they should involve themselves in everything from global warming to peace in the Middle East and running YES campaigns in the failed referendum.
Ignoring basic jobs like fixing potholes and picking up your rubbish and at the same time jacking up your rates, this rag-tag bunch of wannabe politicians are a useless joke who need to get a life. The local level of government would be disposable if the Victorian state government had any idea how they have stuffed Victoria, but we all know they don’t have a clue!
That means we have to all vote or get fined and that means receiving postal votes in the mail where you then must plough through the long list of candidates in your area to tick them off in order of your preference. Most of us – me included – have no idea who any of these candidates are or what they stand for.
All the publicity has centred on Muppet Town Hall with a gaggle of lord mayoral hopefuls and their deputies pestering the media to get their heads on TV, radio or in these pages. Everyone from a bikini designing millionaire to an ex-AFL footballer — who I once defeated in a reality TV cooking show — to an ageing pollster who stands at every Muppet City Council Election Council as far back as I can remember and never wins.
Then, of course, we have the pair who are likely to perhaps win the popular vote and be elected Lord Mayor for the next four-year term. Heaven help us if this week’s series of stunts, fake promises and wish-lists are the best that pair can do. Current stand-in Lord Mayor Nicolas Reece – a former senior advisor to Prime Minister Julia Gillard – and former Deputy to disgraced former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle – Arron Wood are the two leading candidates.
Wood likes to paint himself as a sensible pair of hands — compared with Reece — who has, by the way, overseen the decay of the CBD while serving as Deputy to the lamentable Sally Capp for the past four years – but look a little closer at Woods background and career and you’d be right to worry the direction he would take our city in.
Muppet City Council is already deep into a climate change mantra that saw cars bullied out of the city in favour of bikes. Councillors like Capp loved jumping on board the global warming bandwagon allowing her and others to flit around the world attending various UN sponsored climate conferences pretending Muppet Hall could do anything about the global temperature.
Arron Wood in 2007 was awarded the Prime Ministers Australian Environmentalist of the Year Award by Kevin Rudd. He is also a previous Member of the National Council for Education for Sustainability and was selected to complete Al Gore’s Climate Change Leadership Program. Be afraid if this joker gets elected – he’s obviously smart but I worry the council’s obsession with being a climate change player would get worse.
Reece is better known and until quite recently I appeared on Sky News with him on the hugely successful Paul Murray show and later my own Friday night program. Once he made it clear he was a mayoral candidate and acting Lord Mayor, Sky News suddenly was no longer a media outlet Nick chose to appear on despite numerous invitations.
His problem, though, is his time spent serving ratepayers alongside Sally Capp. Between the two of them — and to be fair along with the Covid lockdowns — that combination ruined Melbourne as we know it. Obsessive construction of un-necessary bike lanes has crippled the CBD traffic wise and while Reece voted to install them, he is now making noises about re-instating a traffic lane in Exhibition St.
Any trader in the city will tell you about this mad obsession with a few bike riders has made their life hell. Reece can’t dodge his role in that or the pantomime he has been performing around graffiti removal hit squads that have done zero to clean up city buildings daubed and defaced with more vandalised art than any other city in Australia.
Then we get to the desperate promises delivered this week from this pair. Again, it highlights that these suburban attention seekers don’t get it that the people they represent – and in the case of the Melbourne City Council businesses – simply want them to run a clean city full of happy people willing to spend time there. Most Victorians currently avoid the centre of town because it’s too hard to get to and when they do visit, they get accosted by drug-affected homeless people.
Lord Mayor Reece on Wednesday unveiled a plan to get workers back into the city by pushing for tax breaks for bosses who take their staff out to lunch. Apparently, this is part of a 10-point plan that would include a proposal to get rid of the hated Fringe Benefits Tax introduced by Paul Keating who I suspect our Lord Mayor idolises. Problem is that federal tax generates a billion dollars of revenue for Canberra and no one on either side of politics would repeal it.
Sally Capp promised the same thing and nothing happened.
Nice headline but it’s not going to happen this time either. Nick’s campaign by the way is being run by the team that gave us Daniel Andrews when he was premier and that’s almost reason enough not to vote for him. His slogan for this campaign has been GETS GOOD DONE – really!!
The third possible winner of this contest is former Carlton star Anthony Koutoufides who at least promises to order council employees — and there are thousands of them — back to their desks which might work better than sending them out for long lunches. Kouta has also vowed to give away free coffee and stage free of charge fitness classes attended by the great man himself.
You can see how mad this has all become and if we didn’t have such a dysfunctional state government, I’d again be urging we fold up Muppet Town Hall and let Spring Street run the city but given what they’ve done to Victoria that’s not a great idea.
If you are eligible to vote in this clown contest it’s a tough choice between a political apparatchik a climate change zealot and an ex-footballer.
Good luck.
P.S. Of course all councils statewide are holding October elections and we all need to vote. I’m enrolled in the Mornington Shire Council, and I note billionaire Lindsay Fox has allowed a candidate called Susan Bissinger to attach her campaign poster to his massive Portsea fence. Bissinger by the way, has recently served a suspension from council for “engaging in misconduct.” Her crime: she objected to council flying the yellow and purple intersex flag outside the council chambers – she might be worth a vote.
Likes
• Going out his way the legendary John Laws hangs up the microphone in Sydney after an incredible 71 years.
• Strength of Melbourne’s Jewish community in the face of rampant antisemitism.
• Friends and family coming together next week to farewell our loved great mate ski identity Colin Hackworth.
Dislikes
• Press Council finding against cartooning genius Mark Knight.
• Under pressure PM Albanese insulting those with Tourette syndrome.
• Premier Allan refusing to bend to the public mood and introduce a protest permit system.
Originally published as Steve Price: Muppet City Council on full display in Melbourne
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