Steve Price: What did $1.2b travel package do for Victoria? Nothing

Victorians like Josh Frydenberg and Dan Tehan in the Federal Government should be ashamed that they haven’t fought harder for their struggling state.

As incredible as it seems, a year ago this weekend thousands of Formula 1 fans waiting in queues outside the Albert Park circuit were told to go home.

Grand Prix organisers appeared at the gate and apologised after one F1 team member tested positive for COVID. The teams were already trackside for practice after Friday events had gone ahead as planned.

It was a financial disaster for Victorian taxpayers and Melbourne has now lost its coveted season-opener, pushed back to late November.

That Saturday morning marked the beginning of Victoria’s dark slide into a year of COVID restrictions, lockdowns, deaths, border closures and economic destruction.

Dr Brett Sutton made the Grand Prix call, and it wasn’t the last time his advice had a major impact on the way we all lived. The next day we found out there would be no crowds at AFL and NRL games, something none of us would have ever imagined in our lifetime.

Next up shaking hands was banned, New Zealand went into a 14-day hard lockdown, and initial 30-day ban on cruise ships kicked in.

An empty Flinders Street Station. Picture : NCA NewsWire

Panic set in at supermarkets with the great toilet paper rush and food hoarding saw queues out the doors and thousands attempting to access emergency payments at Centrelink.

A year on life is still far from back to normal. I flew this week for the first time in just under a year and Melbourne airport still resembles a ghost town.

Many of the airport’s food and beverage venues remain shuttered and you are required to wear a mask inside and while on the flight itself.

Airlines are not required to social distance passengers on a flight, although in economy we had a vacant seat in three seat rows, but I suspect that had more to do with passenger numbers.

I flew to Sydney and it became immediately obvious that the COVID damage there is nowhere near what it is in Melbourne.

Sydney is back to normal with the CBD full of people, public transport — with masks largely — is humming and unlike our city, Sydney feels alive.

Alarmingly Melbourne seems to have fallen harder and tougher than our northern neighbour.

Sydney people are back to work in massive numbers while Melbourne’s CBD is not a shadow of what it was way back on that Saturday morning at Albert Park in March, 2020.

In Sydney at Barangaroo — the newish harbour precinct on the edge of the city — restaurants were packed. Pubs were groaning with patrons on Saturday night and the Bondi RSL fish joint I ate at was booked out.

Traffic is back to pre-COVID levels and you can just feel the confidence all around you.

Melbourne is in BIG trouble.

An empty food retail space in Melbourne CBD. Picture: NCA NewsWire

The incompetent handling of hotel quarantine by Premier Daniel Andrews and his Government that saw more than 800 people die will haunt this city and state for years, if not decades to come.

Aggressive and overzealous lockdowns have sucked the life out of our once buzzing city. You can have all the jingoistic marketing campaigns you like but with Job-keeper payments ending in under three weeks-time we haven’t seen the worst of this yet.

As landlords start to demand rents again from hospitality owners with near empty cafes and bistros, you will see more and more vacant signs appearing.

The State Government and just as importantly Victorian based Federal Ministers of the Morrison Government need to start worrying about their own state.

Disappointingly on Thursday this week a sloppy attempt to fire up domestic tourism with a $1.2 billion dollar handout to the airlines was held at Sydney airport in a hangar with planes in the background.

It should have been in Melbourne. Victoria is the COVID basket case of this pandemic, not NSW.

PM Morrison was waving about a boarding pass to nowhere while standing in the background was Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Tourism Minister Dan Tehan.

Can someone please tell that pair they need to start using some self-interest to help the state and city they represent?

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg needs to start helping the state he represents. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Tehan is from the Western Districts of Victoria and Frydenberg is from Melbourne. What exactly did the package they announced do for us? NOTHING!

The 800,000 half price airfares costing taxpayers over a billion dollars — money straight to the airlines — features only one Victorian destination and that’s Avalon airport.

Ask anyone in Sydney or Brisbane if they would feel safe flying into Avalon for a holiday in Victoria and the answer will be no.

Victoria is still seen by outsiders as COVID risky and with border closures a painful memory, trust me, they are not coming. And can anyone explain why Avalon?

Queensland, by comparison, gets five of the 13 half price destinations including the Gold Coast, Cairns, Proserpine, Hamilton Island and Maroochydore.

Victoria just one. Avalon or Noosa Heads — I know where I’d be going, so again, Victoria is punished for its incompetent state government while Queensland gets all the rewards.

Incredibly the only half-price tickets on offer into Victoria are from Sydney or the Gold Coast flying into Avalon, so we are not even trying to convince tourists from Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Canberra, Brisbane, Townsville to come here.

I suspect the fact that the major airlines — Qantas/Jetstar and Virgin — are based in Sydney and Brisbane counts against Melbourne and Victoria.

The Andrews — now temporarily James Merlino led — Government needs to make it very clear to Canberra they are not happy about this package.

The Victorians in that Federal Government should be ashamed of themselves that they didn’t fight harder for the State they represent.

Originally published as Steve Price: What did $1.2b travel package do for Victoria? Nothing