To save Melbourne, public servants must return to their offices after Australia Day

Melbourne is at its best when the laneways are buzzing with people snacking on sandwiches and coffee and its time workers were forced back into offices.

Forcing public servants back to their city offices is the key to breathing life back into languishing Melbourne. Picture: Ian Currie

At four in the morning at the best of times, the first floor headquarters of Triple M radio in Clarendon St in South Melbourne is a lonely place.

A few scattered producers in early before their much better-paid on-air talent arrive to go to air two hours later.

This week, though, it was even more desolate and depressing.

It was the first week back for most of Melbourne’s radio regulars and I was there to broadcast my national talk program on the Listnr app for Southern Cross Austereo.

The building has been closed to all but essential workers.

After a four-week break, I turned up to find what amounted to a historical dig, like you might find in Egypt. A printer next to my studio had material sent to me on December 17.

Desks were decorated in mini Christmas trees and there were promotional billboards featuring people not even on air anymore. Blocks of chocolate and mini bottles of champagne sent as gifts sat on desks unopened.

It was if time had stood still.

It was creepy and, with Omicron now sweeping across Melbourne, this science fiction-type scene is being played out in office towers across our city.

The Melbourne we know and love is at risk of being lost if workers are not forced back to their offices very soon. Picture: David Geraghty

We must urgently find a way to fix this before we lose our Melbourne.

People must be told to get back to their desks in the CBD and it must start with the bloated Victorian government public service; allowed by their employers – funded by us taxpayers – to sit in front of computers in their homes.

The Andrews government has always been held captive by the unions, and public service unions are still resisting a call for a return to normal duties. Too many of these pen pushers and time wasters have been happy to slop around at home in activewear while still on full pay.

It should never be forgotten — in all this debate about the economic carnage Covid has reigned down on ordinary Australians and their businesses — that state and federal employees have never lost one cent in income.

Not one pay packet.

Indeed, if you were a Victorian parliamentarian, you actually received a pay rise while many in the community were forced on to government benefits or lost their livelihoods.

It’s for this reason alone that there can be no more excuses for public servants not to be at work.

If vaccinated, they should be told ‘the game’s up, you’ve had a good run for nearly two years, you now need to report for duty’.

Anyone who refuses, without a valid exemption, should be made redundant. It’s not as if Victoria couldn’t afford to trim a few off its books.

On the last figures I could find, there was a staggering 322,605 in the public sector workforce in Victoria, and public servant numbers increased 32 per cent to 50,032.

There were 18,400 people added to the wages bill in 2020 as Covid appeared, and the wages bill has blown out to an annual eye-watering $35.4bn.

While private enterprise was desperately trying to keep businesses afloat and was being forced to sack people, the Andrews government was out hiring people … in a pandemic!

According to a report in the Financial Review in May last year, public service wages in Victoria grew faster than any other state and territory.

These people sitting at home in their spare bedrooms are paid more than any public servants in the country except for Canberra.

Strangely, Victorian public servants earn $4800 a year more than their counterparts in NSW, where the cost of living and property prices are higher.

From the middle of next week, after Australia Day on Wednesday, public service offices must again be at, or near, capacity.

Working from home needs to be limited to anyone with Covid symptoms and rapid antigen tests can be used to again populate Melbourne.

Premier Andrews and his ministers are at work, so the staff that service their departments should be as well. I don’t much care if incentives such as free public transport and discounted carparking are needed to get the shift back to head office started, but it must happen.

Melbourne is at its best when the laneways are buzzing with lunchtime workers snacking on sandwiches and coffee, and the office buildings are back operational.

I’d even forgive the smokers hanging out the front for a quick cigarette break if we could get back to some normalcy.

Melbourne is at its best when its iconic laneways are buzzing, and it’s up to all of us to visit, eat, drink and spend up. Picture: David Geraghty

A bloated public service could then motivate the private sector, which also seems very gun shy in allowing full compliments of workers back to the office.

As the UK this week moved to ditch most, if not all, Covid restrictions — including masks and QR coding — we too must aim high and get Melbourne’s CBD moving again, before we get left behind.

A lack of political leadership on this issue is unacceptable and while the DNA of Melbourne – with its wide boulevards, such as St Kilda Rd and Collins St – has been ruined by the mindless construction of little-used bike lanes, we can make Melbourne great again.

By going back to work, the people of this city can make it happen and as the National Australia Bank said this week, the week following Australia Day is shaping as a make-or- break period.

It’s up to all of us to take the city back again; to visit and spend money, to eat and drink and walk and enjoy Marvellous Melbourne.

DISLIKES

• The Hobart hotel guests whining about a few rooftop beers for our Ashes winning cricketers

• A bungled shutdown of IVF services that was never necessary

• Calling Rapid Antigen Tests RATs; let’s try Rapids instead

• Violent crimes against innocent children this week that rocked us all

LIKES

• Anything Ash Barty and Nick Kyrgios have done at the Australian Open. Who would have thought Kyrgios would be so popular?

• UK dropping all its Covid regulations

• A skin cancer successfully cut from my shoulder. Get checked

• Finding some Rapid Antigen Test kits when told I couldn’t

Australia Today with Steve Price can be heard live from 7am weekdays via the LiSTNR app