A tale of two city centres

I have always loved the energy you feel being in the middle of a big metropolis but this week I felt distinctly different vibes in Australia’s two greatest cities.

I spent a few days in the centre of Melbourne, a grid I fell in love with when I moved to Victoria.

My wife and I even lived in the city centre for a number of years and thoroughly enjoyed doing so

It reminded us (in a much more modest self-deprecating way) of the month we spent in a Manhattan studio apartment near Greenwich Village.

We loved central Melbourne’s pedestrian friendliness, the intimate feel of its alleys, its general lack of pretension and the unquenchable Melburnian sardonic sense of humour and quirkiness.

This was perhaps best illustrated by the signboard of the Melbourne Welsh Church on Lonsdale St.

For a while there was a cafe opposite the church was called Badger vs Hawk, so one week the signboard pitted the mentions of hawks against times badgers were featured in the Bible. From memory hawks won.

When there was a succession happening at the Vatican the church posted the slightly risky sectarian pleas of “Gandalf for Pope”.

Elements of this Melbourne still exist, and probably always will, but what I saw in the city centre over the course of walking around for a couple of days gave a much more dismal impression.

In some stretches it seemed every second or third shop was shut even at the main junctions of Flinders St and Elizabeth or Swanston St or those streets and Bourke St.

The shut shop were not decorously closed but boarded up, gutted and with graffiti tags multiplying on plywood or windows.

One alley that used to have my favourite little soba noodle place plus two other cute Asian-style eateries it looked like all those places had been trashed by rioters.

Going out to breakfast one morning proved a challenge.

Places I would normally have go were either completely shut or seemingly still there but with the doors closed.

As has been the case with Melbourne for a long time the homeless were very visible.

It can seem every city centre convenience store franchise comes with the mandatory feature of a homeless person camped out front of it on a cardboard mat.

There were people walking around but still it seemed about half as busy from what I remembered before the long Covid lockdowns.

The only continuously half-bustling site was the big tunnel construction happening next to Swanston St.

Obviously it is a tunnel but it is hard to discern what progress has been made on this in a couple of years.

Today I had a long walk down Sydney’s George St from about where Central Station is to Circular Quay and took a circular root back around the water past The Rocks and back to Town Hall.

There are some shops shut but nowhere near as many as in Melbourne.

Even the Breadtop store’s shelves were better stocked and with more interesting things than the one I saw in Melbourne’s centre.

I didn’t encounter my first homeless person until well past the city centre at Town Hall and the Queen Victoria Building.

I saw a few more but only about the same number in total you would find on a couple of blocks of Swanston or Elizabeth St.

The next day I went walking along George St again when something pulled me up short.

It was a person in a uniform but it wasn’t a police uniform. I then realised what was missing – police.

Police are as ubiquitous in Melbourne’s centre as the homeless convenience store campers.

You often see them patrolling in groups of 10 or more. However, in Sydney it is remarkable how comparably rare they are.

You might spend a day outside in an urban setting without seeing any, which is becoming a ever more unlikely in Melbourne.

Despite the fact they aren’t that different in population, Sydney has always felt the much bigger city than Melbourne, which reflects it is the major international gateway and a big attraction in itself.

It felt even more so like that, the number of people walking around was like a Christmas shopping  throng compared to Melbourne’s slow Sunday morning numbers that never seem to climb that much higher.

Not to say all is hunky dory in Sydney.

I asked both the café I got coffee from and the barber I had a cheap haircut at how business was,

They both said it was still slow and the lockdown had done a lot of damage.

The barber pointed out large parts of George St look like a permanent construction site and I have to admit that seems to have been the case since after the 2000 Olympics.

Even in NSW they are too hooked to big construction it seems.

However, Sydney seems to be a city largely returning to normal, unlike in Victoria the vax mandated entry seems laxly enforced.

There was a big checkpoint at the main entrance to Paddy’s Markets but I walked straight in with no one asking to see my certificate.

Oddly this contrasts with the last time I was here when the QR codes for checking in were much more strictly adhered to than in Melbourne, which helps explains why NSW had better track and trace.

When the hardcore, ideological or utopian left get hold of a major city for long enough it always ends up looking like Detroit after the car factory closures.

New York is a good case study. After years of left-liberal rule in the 1970s the city was famous for its crime. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then better known for busting the Mafia than holding press conferences at the wrong Four Seasons, famously implemented the “broken windows” approach to policing that made the city safe.

Under progressive major Bill de Blasio, who also briefly ran for president, crime has become an issue again.

So much so the incoming mayor is a former policeman who beat his progressive Democrat rivals and is enraging BLM activists with promises of bringing back police practices stopped by de Blasio.

Melbourne may not be Detroit yet but it appears to be headed that way

Andrews and Labor better beware.

In order to create a socialist utopia the precondition is normally having a captive population to force that utopia on.

In every case where a socialist experiment happens next to a freer society people move towards freedom and the better stocked shops.

Victoria could close its borders but its hard to use Covid to jusitify that because despite NSW’s comparative slackness, Victoria remains the Covid hotspot as it has been for the majority of the pandemic period in Australia.

It’s almost like there is a greater Covid risk in Victoria than not being vaccinated or wearing a mask properly.

You should, however, never write a great city off.

People are the power of a city and thousands of ordinary Melburnians will answer the call to reclaim the heart of their state.

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