HILDEBRAND: Difference between Sydney and Melbourne is not just a tale of two cities but of two Labor parties

While the Victorian Labor government has failed to build a rail line from the airport to the city, the NSW Labor government is getting Sydney moving, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The difference between Sydney and Melbourne is no longer just a tale of two cities. It is a tale of two Labor parties.

I was down in my hometown over the weekend and the old Bleak City seemed even bleaker than usual.

Not only had the temperature dropped about 10 degrees from when I got on the plane to when I got off it, but there was an odd feel about the place. The roads were jam-packed, but the streets were empty. So too were the shops.

This wasn’t exactly a scientific study – although no doubt it will be peer-reviewed by Dan fans – but it certainly covered both ends of the socio-economic spectrum.

At my old local shopping centre in Dandenong, there was little hustle and not much bustle on a Saturday afternoon. Discount stores did a brisk trade, while the rest were all but vacant.

The cinema entrance was plastered with a giant poster for a film that came out more than six months ago and has barely graced a movie screen since.

Under Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen the nation’s self-proclaimed cultural capital has become a cultural wasteland. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

Perhaps tellingly, it was “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” and the gods certainly seemed angry that day.

The Myer store, a monument to Dandenong’s dogged aspirations since 1974, had closed a decade ago and the floorspace was now a colourful outpost of a US best-for-less franchise with an Aldi on top.

The centre manager at the time said the Myer had “stagnated”.

So, I lamented 11 years later, had my childhood home.

The city’s ritzy bits were also on the fritz. Driving my uncle’s beat-up ­Corolla from Dandenong to South Yarra – about 25km up the freeway and $250,000 up the income scale – the main drag of Toorak Rd was a drag in more ways than one.

Once more traffic was everywhere except on the footpaths.

When a cost-of-living crisis hits the Range Rover Republic, you know that the revolution is nigh.

NSW Premier Chris Minns with former premiers Mike Baird and Dominic Perrottet to mark the Sydney Metro weekend opening. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Bullard.

Indeed the most vibrant – and congested – leg of my tour was through the streets of St Kilda, but my uncle, a decades-long resident and former mayor, balefully informed me that even in the epicentre of Melbourne’s most iconic hip hotspot, shops were not just empty but closed.

This is a tragedy not just for a reformed Melburnian – and now thoroughly converted Sydneysider – but for all Australians.

If the nation’s self-proclaimed cultural capital is a cultural wasteland, then what hope for the rest of us?

I was mulling over all of this on Saturday night as I browsed the news for what to write in this very column.

The very first story I happened upon began: “Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen faces a political death ­spiral unless the economy starts to ­improve and the falling ALP primary vote can be turned around, according to party heavyweights.”

Talk about divine providence.

Compare this with NSW and Sydney’s sudden, if long-awaited, resurgence.

While the Victorian Labor government has failed, yet again, to build a rail line from the airport to the city – not everyone can afford my uncle’s Corolla chauffeur service – and is ­instead throwing tens of billions at an outer suburban rail loop that will probably never happen, the NSW Labor government is getting Sydney moving.

Evening commuters at Gadigal Metro station for the groundbreaking Sydney Metro . Picture: NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers

Yet it is not being done in the ­miserable, partisan and ideological way that dominates the dour angry politics of Victoria.

When Premier Chris Minns opened the groundbreaking Sydney Metro – a transportational marvel that even my most conservative ­car-loving friends wax ecstatically about – he was quick to pay tribute to the Liberal premiers before him who had helped make it happen.

Arguably the true founding fathers of the project were his own mentor Morris Iemma and his infrastructure guru David Richmond, but Minns was determined to share the credit, and literally brought his predecessors Mike Baird and Dominic Perrottet along for the ride.

It is sobering to think that if that train had crashed, we would have lost our three most handsome premiers in one fell swoop.

But it didn’t and now all of Sydney is abuzz about the Metro.

Likewise, workers are heading back to the office and the CBD is finally coming back to life.

Without wanting to drop the C-bomb, the post-Covid legacy could not be starker.

A crippling record state debt in Victoria of $190bn after Melbourne was the world’s most locked-down city.

In NSW, where the govt deployed a lighter touch, that figure is just $140bn – despite the higher population.

It is also the contrast between a stale old Labor government of the Left whose past mistakes and mistruths are fast overrunning it and a fresh new Labor government of the Right, which is more interested in granting freedoms than taking them away.

The difference is on display in the shopfronts.

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