Make Melbourne Green

We’re in a climate emergency and it’s time for governments at all levels to take urgent action. And as it gets harder to make ends meet financially, it’s time to cut your energy bills.

The Greens want to make Melbourne Australia’s most sustainable capital city. We will use the resources of Yarra and Melbourne councils to offer inner-city residents and businesses:

• A free audit and retrofit of dwellings to reduce energy consumption (and your power bills!) by about 30%. For low-income households, we will also provide free insulation. 

• Installation of solar hot water systems and solar PV panels on your dwelling. If you can’t meet the up-front cost, Council will organise installation and you can pay the costs back from the savings to your power bills so you won’t be out of pocket.

• In time, once the first two projects are established, ReMY (the new Renewing Melbourne and Yarra authority) will look at local renewable power generation, through means such as combined heat and power installing solar panels on public structures. 

The beauty of the scheme is that it largely pays for itself: Council meets the up-front costs so that action can be taken urgently, and ratepayers who take up the scheme can repay the costs over time and still save money! If every house in Australia did this, we’d reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10%. As it is, Melbourne should lead the country, becoming greenhouse gas neutral by 2020, and hopefully the rest will follow. 
 
Most people want to do as much as they can to combat climate change, yet Federal and State governments seem to think the answer lies in higher power bills and coal fired power stations. And the current Melbourne City Council has spent over $50m of ratepayers’ money on the State Government’s convention centre, enough to pay for ReMY several times over!
 
Similar schemes are working overseas (see too here) and are now being explored in Sydney (see too here) and London. It’s time to get ReMY going here. In a climate emergency, we need Greens in local government.
 
Download a full copy of the plan here, and give us your feedback or questions by leaving a comment below.

A proposed law before the State Parliament will clip the wings of any active citizen who runs for local council, by making it a ‘conflict of interest’ to vote on any matter on which they previously made a submission.

It is due to be voted on this coming Tuesday (28th) in the upper house and to stop it, you must lobby the Liberal and National parties to vote for the Greens’ amendments.

Do you know anyone who is running for Council in the elections this November?

Are they active in a number of local community groups which are trying to convince governments to take action in their area? Are they the sort of person that regularly attends Council meetings or writes submissions, until one day they got so fed up they decided to stand for council?

This is a law against those people. It’s a law to discourage them from running, or to knock them out of voting if they are elected.

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Deputy Lord Mayor candidate Cr Kathleen Maltzahn writes:

Three years ago this month, embittered former ALP leader Mark Latham gave a much-covered speech.

After eleven years in the Federal parliament, and six years as a councillor and then mayor, his message was clear. ‘I’m sure there are some young idealistic people interested in running for Parliament’, he said. ‘I have to say to you, as frankly and sincerely as I can, don’t do it’.

Politics, he said, was dirty, it was hard, and the political system was broken. ‘Today, the biggest problems in society, the things that cause hardship and distress for people, tend to be relationship-based’, he went on. ‘They are social issues, not economic.’

If you wanted change, he concluded, ‘don’t get involved in organised politics. Contribute to your community, your neighbourhood, your immediate circle of trust and support. This is the best way forward for a better society.’

I had been on Yarra council less than a year. It was long enough to know that some of what he said was right - large swathes of the community could seem apathetic, political involvement came at the cost of time with people you loved, political timidity and the slowness of change were striking.

Despite that, I was sure Latham was wrong, as I explained in a letter, ‘Why I ran for political office’, published in The Age on September 30:

It’s time to make cycling in the city safe.

The Greens’ plans

To make cycling in the city safe, the Melbourne Greens have already committed to significant measures for the CBD and for Swanston St. As reported in The Age today:

The Greens’ candidate for Lord Mayor, Adam Bandt, has already proposed making permanent bike lanes on Swanston Street, and a range of other measures to make cycling within the city centre safer.

“The number of bike trips to the city has tripled in the last five years, and it is only going to increase,” Bandt says. “Sustainable transport is about more than just lip service; the way to avoid tragedy is to separate bike traffic from other traffic. You shouldn’t have to be a road warrior to get to work on your bike.”

Statewide, The Greens’ ‘The People Plan‘ includes a massive investment for safe bike riding throughout greater Melbourne.

In memory of Carolyn Rawlins

This Wednesday 15 October, on Ride to Work day, there will be a meeting and gathering in memory of the cyclist who lost her life on September 18. There will be a group meeting on Swanston Street out the front of the State Library at 8:00am. At 8:10am, the group will ride slowly down Swanston Street to the Melbourne Town Hall, where there will be one minute’s silence. You are encouraged to leave a flower at the site of the accident (corner Bourke and Swanston) as the gathering makes its way to Town Hall. Pedestrians are welcome to join the group on the day.

And at last we have some more candidates! It’s a pity none of them live in the City of Melbourne.

Has Premier John Brumby really backed Robert Doyle for Lord Mayor? The Australian seems to think so. Maybe the Premier was spooked by the Herald Sun’s highly authoritative online poll!

Whilst we can’t deny that a successful Greens campaign would cause obvious headaches for local ALP members at the state and federal levels (our Lord Mayoral candidate, Adam Bandt, turned the federal seat of Melbourne into a marginal last year, forcing the Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner to preferences), we’ve got to admit that the latest list of Lord Mayoral contenders is slightly surprising: we thought we were campaigning for a local government election, not a state one…

The Greens today unveiled their transport plans for the City.

Click the above link for The Greens’ complete transport vision for Melbourne City Council.

As Bianca Hall reports in today’s Melbourne Times,

A GREENS lord mayor would lobby for public transport to run 24 hours a day and would curb the role cars play in the CBD.

Lord mayor candidate Adam Bandt said his party’s inner-city transport platform … would transform the CBD into a pedestrian and cyclist-friendly zone.

Key to The Greens’ transport vision for the City are:

• Making the tourist bus cost-neutral;
• Introducing a 30km/h throughout Council-controlled CBD roads, and on VicRoads-controlled roads after 8pm;
• Relocating tourist buses from Swanston St to Federation Square;
• Funding safe, well-lit taxi ranks in the city;
• Creating a pedestrian mall on Elizabeth St between Flinders Lane and Flinders Street;
• Removing the unacceptably dangerous Craigieburn line / Macauley Rd level crossing;
• Reinstating Swanston Walk;
• Abolishing the mayoral car and reducing the fuel consumption of the council car fleet;
• Reinstating the Westgate Bike Punt;
• Fast-tracking key commuter bicycle paths, and creating safer bicycle lanes;
• Opposing further reduction of CBD tram stops;
• Increasing the frequency of NightRider services to every 20 minutes; and
• Finally building the bus terminal on Lonsdale St, between King and Spencer Streets.

For the full Transport Policy, click here for the html format or here for the pdf format.

Which one will you vote for: the profit plan? Or the people plan, a visionary new public transport plan that costs less than Eddington’s tunnel proposals?

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The Victorian Greens have released a discussion paper and website proposing a major upgrade of Melbourne’s public transport system. The $14 billion blueprint allows Melburnians to go anywhere by public transport with high-frequency train, tram and bus services covering 101 major centres. This plan has huge benefits for the residents and businesses of Melbourne.