Steve Price: Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece needs to drop the PR spin around the city’s graffiti clean up
Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece has boasted about spending close to$30m a year on graffiti removal, yet the city remains blanketed in ugly tags, smears and slogans. Something needs to change.
Opinion
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Let’s go back in time almost exactly two years ago and a smiling bloke from the Melbourne City Council bragging about graffiti removal.
Gracing the cover of something called Melbourne News, it quoted then Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece calling the effort of a rapid response team “incredible”.
This PR puff piece bragged that the city council was scrubbing the city clean and had removed 80,000 sq metres in four months.
Reece got even more excited and made the ridiculous claim that his rapid response team had removed nearly two MCG’s worth of graffiti in less than four months.
That makes no sense at all and makes the man who wants to get elected Lord Mayor later this year look silly.
A reminder I am talking about a PR piece published two years ago on July 18 in 2022.
Reece went on to explain: “We’re leading the charge to tackle illegal graffiti by cleaning Council-owned buildings and stepping in to help property owners clean up their assets.”
This report revealed 30 per cent of the ugly vandalism was in the CBD, with North Melbourne and Carlton accounting for another 25 per cent plus more ugly tags in West Melbourne and Kensington.
Reece and the council called the graffiti clean-up significant and said it followed a decision to help fast-track graffiti removal from private properties.
This well-meaning attempt didn’t come cheap with council devoting $28.2 million in their budget and boosting their rapid team with an extra $1.5 million.
Let’s fast forward two years and use those promises of financial and physical attacks on graffiti to judge how well Cr Reece, the little-missed former Lord Mayor Sally Capp and the rest of the lamentable Melbourne City Council did with their well-financed rapid response team. They failed miserably!
Melbourne, as I have written in these pages recently, is smeared on almost every surface with ugly tags, smears, words, slogans and dirty crap.
This week we learned that more than $24,000 from that almost $30 million budget for graffiti will be spent getting rid of just one act of vandalism.
The 117-year-old clock tower on Flinders St Station was attacked on July 10 with black and red tags and a white birdlike design smeared on the clock face.
The clock had to be turned off — one of the few times that has happened — to allow a clean-up crew of two blokes using abseiling equipment.
Metro – another Government Department – operates the station and spends $10 million a year on graffiti removal.
Reece and his rapid team it must be said do much better than Metro as anyone reading this who sets foot on a train will attest.
On some lines like Sandringham every surface between Richmond Station and Windsor is covered in ugly paint.
If that’s what spending $10 million looks like, then Metro you are being ripped off.
The broader point here is two years ago Reece promised the Melbourne Council would attack graffiti.
They identified it as a polarising issue for Melburnians and graffiti has become a symbol of the decaying state of our city.
Reece was out again in recent weeks winding up the PR machine dressed in paint spattered clothes pretending to be hard at work, scrub-scrub-scrubbing away at a wall somewhere.
Nicholas, some of us have longer memories than that.
If after two years and millions of dollars council still can’t get on top of this problem something needs to change.
Any councillor who goes to the upcoming council election promising to fix the graffiti problem who is already on council is having a lend of us.
Seeing the back of Sally Capp is a great start to fixing Melbourne but Councillor Reece can’t keep trotting out the old we will clean up the city every couple of years and expect people to vote for him.
I personally like Nic Reece. He was until recently – by his own choice he quit – a regular on my Friday night Sky News program.
He is only one councillor, and he must deal with among other things crazy greens and other misfits who believe being a City Councillor means your job is to save the planet from global warming.
The Melbourne council is not a bunch of kooky zealots like Yarra council, who recently declared their council meat free despite serving up steak dinners pre-council, but they are not far behind.
The big worry is news this week that the Greens will run a double ticket at the end of the year poll, and they are every chance of grabbing the balance of power.
If that happens Reece won’t be Lord Mayor and God only knows what a Green Melbourne will look like.
Bike lane obsessed, global warming climate change zealots and protest hosting hard Left socialists will make what is a city already on its knees – unliveable.
Reece might be a case of better the devil you know.
Likes
— Snow finally hosing down on Victoria’s alpine region with Mt Buller, Falls Creek and Mt Hotham all getting a dump.
— Victoria police finally getting tough on anti-Israel protesters blocking access to businesses.
— Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s brave retelling of her harrowing domestic violence abuse from a former partner.
— Even booze free can’t wait for the Olympics in France to kick off.
Dislikes
— French Olympic venues declared booze free with zero alcohol beer on offer for $13 Aussie dollars.
— Local construction companies seemingly at will shutting major roads with stop/go sign holders allowing trucks access to building sites.
— A so-called wind drought driving Victoria’s wholesale energy price up by 43 per cent.
— On-going denials by a raft of Labor Ministers that they knew nothing about CFMEU corruption allegations.
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Originally published as Steve Price: Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece needs to drop the PR spin around the city’s graffiti clean up
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