Let’s face it, Melbourne is turning into a flat and miserable city
But there may be more straws blowing in the chill south wind, indicating that the glory days are well and truly over when Melbourne, not so long ago, was ranked the world’s most liveable city, and for seven years on end. Let me rehearse some of them.
High birthrates are one sign of upbeat confidence in a society. Families who believe in the future are more likely to have kids. Over the past 15 years, the average Australian birthrate has slumped from nearly 2 to 1.63 children per woman during child-bearing years. Australia is now maintaining its population only with the help of immigration.
The Victorian rate in 2022 stands out, down to 1.51, compared with 1.71 in both NSW and Queensland. The difference between these states is telling, and indicative of some more general mood of pessimism in Victoria.
Brisbane has overtaken Melbourne in having the second highest median house prices in the country. Some in the media have used this statistic to question whether Melbourne is losing its mojo. Brisbane will also host the 2032 Olympic Games, gnawing away at the southern city’s reputation as the nation’s sports capital.
Melbourne’s CBD is struggling to regain its pre-pandemic vibrancy. Small business laments the slow return of workers to offices, underscored by a state government that allows its public servants to continue working-from-home – unlike its NSW counterpart.
A buzz used to characterise the urban hubbub generated in Melbourne’s idiosyncratic rabbit warren of laneways, densely crowded concentrations of eateries, cafes, bars, and alcove shops. Today, the milling throng is back, in pockets at times, but what of the old fizz that spiked the air?
Another component of the Andrews political legacy is the dominant presence of the CFMEU at building sites across the city and suburbs. It is as if CFMEU flags have become the city’s defining insignia.
The taint of corruption and organised crime is now added to the utterly excessive inflation of building costs that this union has been able to impose by its strong-arm tactics across its industry.
The Cain Labor government recognised the harmful consequences of corrupt unions and, in its era, took on the Builders’ Labourers Federation.
The current Victorian Labor government has done just the opposite, giving the CFMEU preferential treatment during the pandemic years, in effect collaborating in flying this deflating canopy of embarrassment across the city.
Further dampening public morale is high government debt. Melbourne did need significant infrastructure development after stagnant Coalition years, but cavalier Labor seemed to believe it could plunge into a swath of loosely costed mega-projects, borrowing without consequence.
The legacy today is that public initiatives of any size are frozen, and for the long term – by debt repayment, reinforced by the threat of international credit agency downgrading.
A grim, penny-pinching state government with no capacity left to innovate is not going to lift the general mood.
It’s worth remembering that the sharp surge in Melbourne spirit in the 1990s was triggered in good part by Kennett government spending big on debt-free infrastructure. There are other signs of loss of civic self-respect, in a city that used to pride itself on its municipal order and cleanliness. There is recurring complaint on talkback radio about the spread of unrepaired potholes, both on city and country roads – car suspension-wrecking potholes.
Further, political unwillingness to address the public eyesore of a graffiti plague suggests a lack of care about appearance – lack of self-respect. Then there is the increasingly visible human tragedy of homeless people sleeping on city pavements; and the mushrooming of sleazy corners where drugs are traded and injected. San Francisco provides the cautionary tale in civic squalor of where this can end.
“To let” signs on local shopping streets have started to proliferate as they did during the pandemic years, a symptom of ailing small business. Restaurants are closing. The atmosphere in public, like in many homes, reeks of recession.
Melbourne has a history of regarding itself as the cultural capital of the nation, pre-eminent in creativity and style, and at times with good reason. Today, arguably the most brilliant children’s television series ever produced in this country, and certainly the most internationally successful one, Bluey, comes out of Brisbane.
Compare this with Chris Lilley’s Melbourne-sourced Summer Heights High from 2007, or the pithy Jack Irish ABC television series shot in Fitzroy. To my mind, the best new Australian television series, Boy Swallows Universe, also came out of Brisbane.
Linked, there has been poor judgment in celebrating the best of local talent. For instance, the wonderful misty landscapes of 1930s Beaumaris artist Clarice Beckett have only recently found wide public recognition. Yet, for some reason the city’s National Gallery of Victoria chose not to exhibit the retrospective of her work. Geelong did.
Barry Humphries was very much a Melbourne boy. On live stage in his beloved home city, he would quiz audience members on which suburb they lived in, and in which street – usually familiar with its features. He celebrated the grainy colours and fibre of its vast suburbia in his comedy, starting in Moonee Ponds.
Yet, when he died as arguably the greatest creative stage talent Australia has ever produced, incisive social satirist, brilliant side-splitting comic wit, his Dame Edna an international superstar, the state government showed no inclination to host a public funeral. That went to Sydney. What has happened to Victoria’s cultural antennae?
This survey is provisional and impressionistic. There are counter examples. One I would cite is the extraordinarily high aesthetic quality of recent apartment buildings in Collingwood. A collective architectural tour de force has transformed one corner of the inner city.
This may, however, reflect the now past pre-eminence of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Architecture Faculty in the 30 years Leon Van Shaik was professor and dean – with him crafting its philosophy, its teaching, and its high morale. That RMIT produced generations of talented and inspired architects.
A city is like a football team, in that its being in form depends on a collective spirit or mood.With a city, the mood is more elusive and diffuse, spread in complex tendrils through all the myriad different nooks and layers of community, family, work and leisure, influencing ordinary day-to-day doings as it does spectacular creations and performances.
The question that follows: how flows the Melbourne spirit today, presses for an answer. My sense is that the mood is flat, even grim.
John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.
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