Steve Price: Lord Mayor Sally Capp may not be up for job of rebuilding Melbourne
Rebuilding Melbourne is a job for someone willing to make tough decisions, but Lord Mayor Sally Capp seems more interested in making friends.
Opinion
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As Melbourne staggers out of 2020 to be re-born in 2021 there are few people more important than its Lord Mayor Sally Capp.
Sadly, her performance around Australia Day this week has thrown a huge doubt around her capacity to lead the city at a time when it most needs leadership.
Lord Mayor Capp seems captive of the progressive Left and more interested in virtue signalling and having people love her for her views and being seen as popular rather than making big decisions to save the city.
Attending an Invasion Day dawn service on Tuesday when Melbourne’s state government run Australia Day parade had been cancelled using COVID as the excuse was a big mistake. It was a bad look.
Lord Mayor Capp loves a camera and a microphone and is a good media performer but for someone forced to live through the Sydney City leadership of long-term Lord Mayor Clover Moore, I can tell you Melbourne needs to be very worried.
Cars become the city’s enemy, with already crowded streets jammed up with little used bike lanes, and believe me the Sydney CBD at weekends is a graveyard.
Sally isn’t Clover yet but she’s getting close and her administration seems to be a Green/Left dominated politically correct bunch who just think Melbourne will automatically bounce back.
What Melbourne really needs right now, in this unprecedented time of virus-impacted businesses, is someone with a vision to not just return Melbourne to pre-COVID times but to reinvent itself.
It’s naive to think we will simply revert to the glory days of pre-COVID with trendy little bars full of drinkers and the city lanes crowded with shoppers and city workers.
For a start a large percentage of those city workers will continue working from home, so we need some bright ideas to ignite our city.
I’m not sure the people around Sally Capp and the council in general are up to it.
Our city has had a mixed experience with city councillors and it’s really only been the combination of private enterprise and public servants that’s achieved much.
Think Ron Walker and Lloyd Williams with Jeff Kennett or the Grollo family and Labor Governments giving us the Rialto and Crown Casino. The entire Southbank precinct once home to warehouses and car yards was reclaimed and turned into a shopping and residential precinct.
Docklands — whether you love or hate the area — was developed into a CBD extension and wisely kept out of the hands of the Melbourne City Council.
Post-COVID we need that sort of energy and it’s not coming, I am convinced, out of Town Hall.
If Premier Daniel Andrews wants to cash in on his post virus popularity, I’d advise he establish a panel of successful Melbourne business people, the entrepreneurs and risk takers, and let them advise what Melbourne should look like for the next decade.
We must take this opportunity to create a new Melbourne, a Melbourne people want to come to again, and it’s not just the CBD.
Our famous shopping strips like Brunswick Street and Chapel Street deserve equal attention.
If you asked anyone from Sydney about a weekend getaway to Melbourne pre-COVID the reasons for coming usually fell into three categories.
Top of the list pre-2020 was probably sporting based major events like the Australian Open tennis the Formula 1 Grand Prix or Melbourne Cup Carnival. We must save and make those events better.
Food and the quality and diversity of our restaurants ran a close second, although in recent times Sydney and now even Brisbane have caught up a lot. We need to offer all the support this sector asks for.
Right at the top of the list especially for female visitors was the quality of Melbourne’s clothes shopping. Those visitors interested in topping up their wardrobe invariably told you that Chapel St South Yarra was a favourite destination.
Not these days. I took a walk down Chapel Street from Toorak Rd to Commercial Rd and back this week and it’s a depressing mess.
I admit I have thought the shopping precinct along Chapel St was struggling for a fair while but what I witnessed as we emerge from COVID 2020 was shocking.
Chapel St along that stretch is grubby and verging on ghost town status.
What made the walk even sadder was the irony of the plastering of black and white posters along the stretch I walked with a Support Local campaign.
Here is the street by numbers and what a sad indictment it is:
Starting at the corner of Toorak and Chapel on the eastern side of the street I headed toward Malvern/Commercial Rd and discovered 15 retail outlets shut before I even reached the Jam Factory.
That’s a distance of around 600 metres. Shops up for lease include Declic, where I often would purchase ties, and the Telstra retail shop where I have spent hours trying to sort out phone problems.
If Telstra walks away from your retail strip you really know you have a problem. As for the Jam Factory itself, what a sad lonely old place that’s become.
I’m old enough to remember when the Jam Factory first opened and was the HQ for IXL, the jam people, and John Elliott.
Today it houses the cinema complex and that’s about it. Without the movie theatres you could just about knock the joint over and a proposed hotel development on the site seems to have stalled or fallen over.
Only problem if you knocked it down it would probably resemble the huge block of vacant dirt just up the road with a developer’s fence and name around it and not much else.
Between the Jam Factory and Commercial Rd there are another 10 vacant stores and those that are left seem to be a collection of pawn shops and kebab sellers with the odd cafe thrown in.
In total 25 vacant shops on one side of the street plastered forlornly with For Lease signs. Crossing at the lights headed in the direction of the Prahran Market — seemingly to me the only bustling healthy venue on the street — I headed back down the western side toward Toorak Rd.
And remember this stretch on that side of Chapel St was once considered Australia’s answer to Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive for clothes shopping.
The retail Armageddon was even worse walking this way with a total of 31 empty stores littered with unopened mail stuck under the doors and more hopeful For Lease signs.
So on a walk shorter that two kilometres on what was once the premier shopping strip of Melbourne there are 56 empty shops.
Chapel St at the South Yarra end is on life support and I suspect the tourists have either stopped seeing Melbourne as a shopping destination or simply book a room at that hotel next to Chadstone Shopping Centre and shop there.
It’s beyond sad and we can’t let the Chapel St walk of shame spread across our city.
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Originally published as Steve Price: Lord Mayor Sally Capp may not be up for job of rebuilding Melbourne
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