Steve Price: Melbourne needs a New York style ‘broken windows’ moment to save it
Melbourne is being suffocated by graffiti, public drug use and anti-social behaviour. Only a ‘broken windows’ police strategy — the kind that rescued New York in the 1990s — can save it.
Opinion
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Melbourne is decaying right before our eyes.
The CBD is already a lost cause and now the inner suburbs are going the same way.
It’s the small things that should matter that are being ignored and the mess you step over is the mess you endorse.
Graffiti vandalism is so out of control that local councils have simply given up trying to clean it off.
Bring on the critics who after reading this will point out that Melbourne late this week was listed as being the fourth most liveable city in the world.
It used to be number one. The number four ranking is a joke with the list created for companies relocating executives overseas. The ranking is based on stability, healthcare, culture, environment, education and infrastructure.
Melbourne hospitals are being told to turn out the lights, our state schools are running short of teachers, and we are in the middle of a housing crisis including a blowout in rental costs.
True, on a stability rating, we don’t have attempted coups very often, you could in some twisted way claim the graffiti as culture and our environment is pretty good.
Sydney rated number seven and we beat out Geneva, Vancouver, Osaka and Auckland.
Perhaps the judges should take the walk I took.
Heading down Victoria St in Richmond from Church St to Hoddle St midweek revealed a strip that could be straight out of a third-world country but without any of the vibrancy you find in a broke nation.
What an absolute disgrace and failure that strip now is, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone involved, from the local council to the local state and federal members of parliament.
Adam Bandt, the leader of the Greens, we are looking at you. Gabrielle De Vietri, another Greens MP and the local member, we are looking at you. Yarra City council, what the hell are you people doing?
You have failed your community and your city and sadly it’s now too far gone to rescue.
Victoria St is a filthy slum. Decaying before our very eyes. Represented in Canberra and Spring St by Green MPs more interested in supporting Palestine, howling at the moon over global warming and legalising the use of recreational drugs.
I wonder when the last piece of graffiti was removed from any building on that strip, or when any politicians did as I did this week, walk Victoria St.
Shame on you all to have let what was a booming little Saigon not more than 20 years ago decay to the empty, dirty mess that it is now.
It’s not alone. Chapel St between Dandenong Rd and Toorak Rd isn’t much better.
High end retail long ago fled Chapel St to set up shop in High St Armadale that is now clearly the premier shopping strip in all Melbourne.
The Windsor and South Yarra parts of Chapel St are now home to a sad collection of homeless people, drug-affected losers (many with mental health issues), empty retail stores, bombed out tobacco shops and a few kebab sellers and a couple of faded nightclubs.
After dark it feels dangerous, and the few decent restaurants and cafes struggle to make a living.
It will come as no surprise this once lively tourist destination is also represented in state parliament by the Australian Greens — a bloke called Sam Hibbins, who has his electorate office off Chapel St around the corner in High St.
Interestingly, during my walking investigation of both strips the only place I saw any graffiti being removed was from his shopfront.
The decay comes with a lazy ignorance of what is and isn’t legal and an indifference to what is right and wrong.
Riding Melbourne’s tram system to get between Windsor and Victoria streets I discovered that the state government’s contractor Yarra Trams are running a free public transport system way outside the city free tram network.
On three long trips up Chapel and Church streets I was staggered to witness dozens of people across all age brackets simply board the tram and take a seat without any intention of using a Myki to pay.
On trip one, two people tapped on in peak hour across a 25-minute ride.
I was one of the two and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. No tram inspectors on any of the trips and clearly the tram drivers have enough to do negotiating the traffic.
This 10-year-old state Labor government is to blame but they don’t seem to care, leaving the disastrous Myki system in place while other Australian cities use credit cards to tap on and off.
Local commuters I spoke to said they would be more likely to pay to use the public transport system if it was as simple as using a phone.
Ignoring the fact you can attract a $288 fine seems to have become a risk tram-users are willing to take with one commuter adding up her free trips and calculating how many free rides it will take to crack that figure.
Incredibly, there is even a Facebook Page with 40,000 users that tracks the whereabouts of tram inspectors known as Authorised Officers and who are employed by the public transport operators.
They can issue fines; demand you provide proof of identity and in extreme cases detain you until police arrive – but where the hell are they?
That Facebook group by the way – when you try to join – has this warning: “If you are a ticket inspector you are a complete piece of human garbage and you can f**k all the way off.” Charming.
On Wednesday at the corner of Flinders St and St Kilda Rd there were three customer service officers on duty and when questioned made the point they can’t check Myki usage — that was the job of the authorised officers, not them.
Graffiti smeared buildings, aggressive drug addled homeless people, illegal tram riders and empty retail shops along two of our once proud, multicultural hubs and it seems the people of Melbourne are simply willing to accept all that brings.
New York famously had its broken window moment under now-disgraced former mayor Rudy Giuliani in the late 1990’s. It was a tough on crime policy led by Police Commissioner William Bratton.
Sadly for greater Melbourne, we have a bunch of Greens-dominated local councils without the willingness to clean up their individual patch.
Melbourne city itself has been led by the lamentable Sally Capp who thankfully steps down as Lord Mayor at the end of this week.
Melbourne needs its own broken window moment before it’s too late – sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon and we are all the poorer for it.
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