One bloke says he’s leaving Melbourne for the Gold Coast and a bunch of people lose their minds.
Get a grip, will you?
I know people love their cities like their firstborns – but sometimes, even your precious little cherubs lose their way and require a bit of discipline and tough love.
There’s nothing worse than a parent who believes the sun shines out of their child’s backside; who takes any criticism of said child as a personal slight and refuses to admit even the slightest fault.
A whole lot of Melburnians seem to have taken the same attitude to their city, if the reaction to entertainment reporter Peter Ford is anything to go by.
He said six months ago that he was planning to leave Melbourne due to rising crime, and next week, he’s packing up for the Gold Coast.
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He told the Herald Sunthat “crime is a big problem in Melbourne and I just hate some things going on”.
“I don’t leave with bad vibes, I just think there are issues going on in Melbourne that need to be fixed,’’ Mr Ford said.
“I don’t want to walk over people to get to Coles. You would never see an empty shop on Chapel St and now there’s empty and dirty shop windows everywhere.
“Every real estate agent I went to up north said, ‘oh, you’re another one from Melbourne’, so certainly there are things that have prompted that.”
He’s not the only one.
Some 8500 people left Melbourne for somewhere else in the state or country in the 2024-25 financial year – many of them heading to Queensland.
Sydney had a much larger exodus of 33,000, but that was largely driven by affordability as opposed to dissatisfaction with the state of the city.
But, for these comments, Mr Ford has endured the wrath of livid Melburnians on social media. They’re outraged that someone would dare to say the city has gone downhill and there’s somewhere else they’d rather live.
A bit of parochialism is good, but I’m afraid some have their blinkers so firmly fastened that it would seem to be depriving their brains of adequate oxygen.
I’m Adelaide born and raised and I’ve lived in Melbourne and Sydney, so I am qualified to give an impartial view.
And I won’t be suggesting that one city is unequivocally superior to another, which seems to be another fascination of Melburnians any time someone mentions Sydney.
Unfortunately, I moved there on the day the last Covid lockdown began, so my first three months of Melbourne life were awful. I was struck by the narky insistence of some that we all adhere to the most ridiculous restrictions.
But I like Melbourne – or certainly the patch of it in which I lived, around South Melbourne.
Albert Park Lake was at the end of my street, I had great pubs and restaurants within walking distance, the South Melbourne Market was wonderful, St Vincent Gardens was a great place to walk and my Southbank office was about 25 minutes away on foot.
But my car was done over twice in the 18 months I lived there – something I’ve not experienced anywhere else I’ve lived. Someone also ripped two freshly planted petunias out of a pot I had hanging on my front fence, which I thought was an odd crime.
Crossing from Southbank to the CBD, I was frequently confronted by unsavouriness at the intersection of Flinders and Elizabeth streets. It’s one of the busiest and most visible junctions in the city and yet it was frequently filled with drunk and drug-addled people in the middle of the day, often yelling and swearing at each other. It was hardly a hospitable welcome.
I lived there between 2021 and 2023 and safety has only grown worse since then.
Chocolate shop Koko Black, of all businesses, last year hired private security for its Swanston St shop because the behaviour of customers and passersby had become aggressive.
Melbourne City Council deployed its own band of security guards to patrol the city like quasi-cops in October – dubbed the “Reece Police” for Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece.
The same month, a council report found that three in five people don’t feel safe in the city at night and nearly a quarter felt unsafe during the day.
Elsewhere, in suburban Melbourne, gang and youth crime is rife. Aggravated burglaries have hit a record high.
Residents have clubbed together and hired private security companies to patrol their suburbs at night, including Werribee, Wyndham Vale, Camberwell, Hawthorn, Toorak, Brighton, Caulfield and Balwyn.
This is not an imagined problem.
But some in Melbourne seem to find it impossible to admit any kind of fault. They are so steadfast in their parochialism that they refuse to believe there is anything wrong with their city or that another city could possibly be better.
Its pretentiousness is, at times, nauseating. Melbourne has hung its hat for so long on the fact that it has the best coffee and the best restaurants and the best bars – but Adelaide now gives it a run for its money on that front. Those old enough to remember – I was a wee lad at the time – have told me that Adelaide now is what Melbourne was 20 years ago and without all the w**k.
I point out none of this to run down Melbourne but to demonstrate that it has significant problems that would drive people to leave.
I visit regularly and will continue to do so.
Melbourne is a great city. But it could be a greater city. And you can’t fix a problem until you admit one exists.
