Steve Price: Melbourne is woke, broke, dirty and violent — I’m ready to return to Adelaide
Melbourne deserves so much better than green-left governments that have left this once great city woke, broke, dirty and violent. Adelaide is my hometown and I’m ready to go back.
Opinion
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Adelaide is my hometown and I am ready to go back.
I’m sick of Melbourne and the way it’s being slowly strangled by state and local governments.
Broke and woke the place I’ve called home off and on since 1976, or 48 years, is now too big, too dirty, too politically Green and it’s just too hard living here.
Dan Andrews obsessive Covid lockdowns changed forever the soul of the state and only a couple of major events and the AFL makes it bearable.
Restaurants are expensive, the CBD has been wrecked by Sally Capp and her council, we are flooded with migrants and real estate is too expensive for any of our children to buy a house.
I remember standing on the grid for the Adelaide 500 V8 Supercars event in December 2022 where I came across the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.
The charismatic South Australian politician had promised two years earlier during the election campaign to bring the V8s back to the streets of Adelaide.
Labor won and the Premier was basking in the glory of his delivered promise.
It was a smart political move and showed how out of touch the previous Premier, the Liberal Party’s Steven Marshall, had been dumping the event.
Compare Premier Pete’s inspired major event election tactic to the expensive botched scrapping of the Commonwealth Games by the hapless former Victorian premier Dan Andrews and his replacement Jacinta Allan, or even the messy Queensland stadium debacle leading into their 2032 Olympic Games.
On that day back in 2022, Malinauskas stuck out his hand and said: “I understand you are a South Australian born in Adelaide, I reckon you need to come home”.
I laughed off the suggestion, but fast forward 16 months and if my media work wasn’t Melbourne based, I reckon I’d be sorely tempted to leave Melbourne and go home to Adelaide.
And if I did, I’d be part of a long line of Victorians heading west or north, or any direction really, to escape the suffocating stranglehold Victorian Labor has around our throats financially and socially.
It’s a peculiar type of torture that’s about to get a lot worse when the clueless bloke who has helped bankrupt our state – Tim Pallas – hands down his budget on Tuesday May 7.
Broke and teetering on the edge of financial downgrade, this bloke and his premier are desperate.
Just this week, thanks to the Victorian Opposition, we learnt Pallas and co weeks before the last State Budget made a secret request for funds if needed to pay its interest rate bill.
A request had come from Treasury after they worked out they were $57.2 million short.
If that doesn’t make you nervous you are very brave.
Pallas spun the reason why and convinced no one.
Put simply, Pallas and Allan will be coming after your wallet with fresh taxes on top of things like the crippling land taxes causing investors to flee the state or put second properties on the market.
If that’s not bad enough, we have weak Government leadership from the top – that’s you Jacinta Allan – and a police service frustrated by a politicised legal system that simply acts like a revolving bail door, spitting violent young offenders back onto our streets.
Just this week we have seen shocking images of machete and axe-wielding teenagers brawling and rampaging through a Melton shopping centre.
We had yet another dangerous high speed car chase with offenders as young as 14 reaching death defying speeds of 200 km/h through dozens of suburbs ending in police ramming the car.
Broke, beset with violent crime and a slew of late, over-budget major projects that make getting to work a frustrating daily grind — you must ask who wouldn’t be tempted to move to Adelaide or Hobart or even Perth or Far North Queensland.
Critics of the idea that Melburnians are fed up and desperate for change just stick their heads in the sand and call people like me whingers.
And I’ll get the normal gormless reaction on social media telling me if I don’t like it here then I should piss off home and they’d be happy to drive me to the border.
That’s missing the point — Victoria and Melbourne deserve better that what we are being served up.
This is a great state and Melbourne used to be a great city but a decade of Labor, out-of-control immigration getting worse by the day and the impact of heavy-handed arrogant handling of Covid by a control freak (Andrews) means we are no longer that.
Australia’s best two political leaders are clearly Malinauskas and NSW Premier Chris Minns with the rest, federally and in the states, a long way behind.
Just look at how Minns handled the shocking stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel this week and before that the horrors of the Bondi mass murder on Saturday.
Minns fronted the media the morning after the church attack and riot, flanked by his Police Commissioner Karen Webb and declared the church attack a terrorist attack.
He was angered at the riot that followed with parishioners turning on police and attempting to storm the church and causing major damage to police vehicles.
He was calm, decisive and blunt after three days that rocked Sydney.
I’m not sure we would have had the same no-nonsense approach if similar incidents happened in Victoria where the hard-left Labor government would be very reluctant to call out the religious tensions that seem to have caused that attack on the bishop.
South Australia and NSW are lucky to have Malinauskas and Minns respectively, and the pair remind me of Victoria’s last good Labor leaders, men like Steve Bracks and John Brumby.
If Victoria and Melbourne’s leaders continue to ignore the mess they have presided over there will be a rush especially by business to the exit doors.
They won’t be alone.
LIKES
— The unprompted bravery in the face of danger at Bondi Junction mass stabbing – real heroes.
— Close to being an EV convert after a weekend testing a Mercedes EQS 450.
— Honest appraisal at last around the lack of success of the AFLW competition with dwindling crowds and TV audiences.
— Cape Shank RACV a jewel in Victoria’s tourism offerings.
DISLIKES
— State Government sitting on $113 million of disused MYKI card money.
— Mornington shire council’s destructive thought bubble to impose a fresh developers levy – madness.
— Reluctance to man suburban shopping centres with armed PSO’s makes no sense.
— Immigration numbers now out of control with net intake 100,000 in February alone.
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