Steve Price: Woke Melbourne City Council’s climate obsession proves it’s time to overhaul Town Hall

Melbourne’s CBD is a graffiti-smeared, dirty, bike lane-spoiled base for the homeless but instead of improving life for the people who pay their rates, its Council has an obsession with climate change.

Melbourne City Council should be prioritising cleaning up the CBD instead of focusing on climate change mitigation, Steve Price says.

Melbourne is in the grip of the dual disasters of having an incompetent state premier and an equally disastrous City Council led by Sally Capp.

Add to that depressing state of affairs the trifecta of a shambles of an opposition.

It must be time to have a genuine debate about getting rid of at least one level of government. As much as many Victorians would love that to be the shifty, money-draining, faction-driven fools in Spring Street, I think we should start at Town Hall.

Time and again I have highlighted the graffiti smeared, dirty, bike lane-spoiled base for the homeless that the CBD has become. However, the problem the City Council has at its beating heart is a global Green obsession with climate change.

Councillors from Sally Capp and her deputy, Nicholas Reece, down have adopted the fanciful notion that council policy can have some influence on the planet’s climate.

They even have a name for the strategy that is driving Victorians out of their capital city that was once Australia’s premier shopping destination and the centre of the “garden state” – remember that slogan?

Councillors from Sally Capp and her deputy Nicholas Reece down have adopted the fanciful notion that council policy can have some influence on the planet’s climate. Picture: Jason Edwards

Check out the council’s official website and marvel at the amount of time, energy and money being poured into something called the 2018 Climate Change Mitigation Strategy to 2050.

You will be amazed at the language and the crazy ideas buried in this folly of a plan. The ambition is to have Melbourne at zero emissions by 2040 while talking about wider Melbourne having a population of nine million people.

The Climate zealots who are crazy enough to put this pipedream plan down in writing – they even want you to volunteer to do a survey – say climate change threatens to hit Melbourne with heatwaves, flooding, droughts and poor air quality.

That sounds to me a little like Melbourne’s four seasons in one day climate that we have always had.

Sadly, for the people who pay rates in the city of Melbourne, this climate obsession is costing millions of dollars. Picture: David Caird

The Melbourne City Council has no jurisdiction over Sunshine or Broadmeadows or Pakenham or even Albert Park so why don’t they stick to what they are elected for – matters in the city.

Sadly, for the people who pay rates in the city of Melbourne, this climate obsession is costing millions of dollars. As an example, they brag about spending $17m on 2224 solar panels and the installation of 11,816 street lights.

And that’s a fraction of what the Climate Change Mitigation Strategy will end up costing. The plan reveals they want to electrify all council vehicles which would mean selling off diesel and petrol-powered cars, vans and trucks and buying at a huge cost massively more expensive replacements.

The ambition is to have Melbourne at zero emissions by 2040 while talking about wider Melbourne having a population of nine million people. Picture: David Crosling

Under the slogan Melbourne for 1.5C — whatever that means — they publish page after page of meaningless statistics and motherhood statements about the Paris Climate Agreement.

The council even admits that the City of Melbourne back in 2003 set a target of zero emissions by – wait for it – 2020. A failure obviously.

Indulge me and have a read of this actual paragraph from the Council’s own climate strategy document online.

The City of Melbourne’s preferred approach is to deliver the actions needed to achieve the significant action scenario and pursue actions for the accelerated action scenario where there is opportunity to go further.

I won’t torture you with any more of this impossible-to-understand raving but like Premier Andrews the council mob pluck figures to justify their obsessions from the sky.

They claim climate inaction and not reaching a low carbon economy – note they’ve dropped the word zero there – will cost $12.6bn to the municipality’s economy by 2050.

That’s 27 years away and just a pie in the sky guess at best.

Council has even spent ratepayers’ money designing — and you are going to love this — four free climate walking tours that are self-guided, between two- and four- kilometres in length. What fun they would be.

Like Premier Daniel Andrews the council mob pluck figures to justify their obsessions from the sky. Picture: Tony Gough

The highlights include visits to – and I’m quoting the council climate plan here – green walls, green roofs, tree pits, storm water harvesting systems and urban gardens.

You need to sign up online and be careful not to get crushed in the rush.

Melbourne City Council is not the only Australian local government administration acting so far outside their brief to run a sensible roads, rates and rubbish as to be out of control. Just this week Sydney’s veteran Lord Mayor Clover Moore jumped on the ban gas bandwagon and voted to make the City of Sydney gas free.

Various metropolitan Melbourne councils – just think Mornington Peninsula and the newly renamed Merri-bek Council – are also deep into the climate change obsession often to the detriment of ratepayers.

Simply wider Melbourne and the CBD has too many talentless, trumped up, seat warming, ego maniacs populating council chambers.

Using climate concerns to legitimise expensive overseas trips to check out sister city climate action plans they do little to improve the lives of the people who pay their rates.

At the very least Victoria and the Victorian government should massively overhaul local government with amalgamations to get rid of many of these crazy out of control time servers.

Instead of a zero emissions ambition what about zero waste.

Originally published as Steve Price: Woke Melbourne City Council’s climate obsession proves it’s time to overhaul Town Hall