Ours must be the city of tomorrow
WHOA! Another year gone and another new year staring down the barrel at us. How fast was that? I can’t believe how quickly time passes. All the more reason to forge ahead with the challenges facing this great city of Geelong. No rest for the wicked, don’t let the grass grow under your feet and all that.
I just had a look at some figures showing just how fast Geelong is changing. And growing. They’re extraordinary. We’re right in the middle of basically the biggest changes to Geelong ever.
The population is going through the roof. New industries are springing up in the place of old manufacturing juggernauts like Ford and Alcoa. More and more people have university degrees and post-grad credentials. The number of professionals in the workplace is soaring.
Industries with Geelong workers are growing like Topsy, building activity is surging, housing prices are strong and seriously competitive with Melbourne.
Demographer Bernard Salt released figures just before Christmas that showed growth in the prime home buying workforce age group (25-50) between 2011 and 2016. At a national level, the increase was 5 per cent. In Geelong, it was a smashing 16 per cent — the third highest in the country, behind Darwin on 17 and Melton on 21.
The CBD and waterfront are being transformed with classy high-rise apartments that everyone likes except Geelong MP Christine Couzens, who doesn’t like them at all unless she’s told to by her political bosses. Ha. What a loser. Seriously, some of the buildings are rippers: The Mercer, Balmoral, Miramar, G1 — and we have terrific new buildings springing up for WorkCover, the NDIS and all kinds of new commercial operations.
The Little Malop entertainment precinct is finally firing, the botanic walk on Malop St looks great and half-finished Johnstone Park is about to reveal spectacular new terraced water gardens. It all should have been done much sooner, but better late than never as they say.
The planning and work-start of all these things date back to my proudest of mayoral times for this great city of Geelong.
And much as I think Deakin’s new student digs on Brougham St look like a Latin republic penitentiary, the long-awaited town-andgown university inner city of Geelong is now a buzzing, thriving reality.
The Geelong waterfront is a sensation, apart from too many pedestrian crossings. Western Beach is about to host some extraordinary apartment precincts and, even though it needs a decent shoreline clean-up, is fast becoming inner Geelong’s best address.
Geelong has top hospitals — two first-order private hospitals in St John of God and Epworth and one fantastic public hospital. Pity the public hospital is underresourced, though, and its staff overworked. You’d think some- one like State Government minister Lisa Neville, herself a former chair at Barwon Health, would do something to help. There are great schools, a university, and so much more.
Not surprisingly, people are flooding into new estates. They’re desperate to take up the Geelong/ Bellarine/Surf Coast lifestyle and escape the clogged-artery rat race that Melbourne has become with its traffic crisis. And to escape the inflated price it costs to live in that urban quagmire.
Melbourne, the world’s most liveable city? You have got to be joking. People are wasting half their lives stuck in traffic.
It’s like India. And it’s getting worse. In fact, it’s actually going to be a disaster over the next five years as the Andrews Government’s belated road and rail works are a mess.
How’s that supposed to be liveable? All it really is is a political time bomb for the new govern- ment that will inevitably replace dismal Dan in late 2018. Talk about self-serving setups that hold the public hostage.
While Melbourne’s going backwards, Geelong’s powering ahead. Despite the best efforts of the Government to stop it all. Fortunately, the Andrews Government’s so bad at things it can’t even stuff up things properly.
You know, the way we’re going, I reckon Geelong should be made capital of Victoria.
It could have been, back in the real early days when Melbourne was making up fake maps of where the goldfields were so immigrants arriving by ship went to Melbourne port instead of Geelong. Talk about dirty tricks. You’d think it might have been Dan’s great-great grandpa running the place.
Fact is, Geelong is a far better place to live than Melbourne. And the new year, 2018, is going to see thousands more people pouring into this city to prove my point. And they’re going to keep coming.
All these new arrivals, good as they might be for the local economy, though, will still present issues. We need to stay right on top of infrastructure, especially with the speed of that growth picking up like it has.
Melbourne’s showing us right now what happens when you forget about infrastructure. Geelong needs more roads, schools, railway lines and stations and car parks. It needs more medical centres, aged care centres, schools, shopping centres and community services.
Taking the heat off Melbourne as 140,000-plus people come into the state a year means Geelong is entitled to extra money for infrastructure. And extra help driving the businesses that will provide jobs for all these people and their families.
That means Geelong needs a solid, loud voice. A voice that’s not fractured or twisted by self-interest, politics, the red tape of bureaucracy or the corruption of political donations.
Geelong is a smarter city, its people are smarter, its investors are smarter, its research is smarter. That’s official.