Councillors Geoff Porter, Alan Bolton and Chandra Bamunusinghe want answers to what they consider to be the “disgrace of Hume’s southern gateway”.
The trio took a stance last week alongside the blue hoardings of roadside art set up to hide the less-than-attractive Pascoe Vale Road railway tracks and, on the horizon less than 10 kilometres away, the glittering high-rise steel and glass of Melbourne’s CBD.
As traffic poured on and off the Western Ring Road, Cr Porter said the new year would mean new resolve among councillors to bring “postcode 3047” into public focus again.
It’s an area hit especially hard by the demise of the auto industry and car-maker Ford Australia’s impending closure.
“We need to provide as many opportunities as possible for this area,” Cr Porter said.
“Broadmeadows and Dandenong have the highest rates of unemployment in the state. It’s unacceptable.”
What Cr Porter and his colleagues also find unacceptable is the lack of government interest in doing anything about cleaning up the decades of neglect that marks Broadmeadows as a down-at-heel area more akin to its auto-making US counterpart Detroit than to a vibrant activity centre in ‘the world’s most liveable city’.
“It’s just not fair,” Cr Porter said.
When a grant of almost $15 million allocated by the previous state Labor government failed to materialise by early this year, Cr Porter, as mayor, wrote to then treasurer Kim Wells.
Months later, there was still no reply.
Almost a year on, Cr Porter and colleagues are writing to Transport Minister Terry Mulder seeking help cleaning up the railway tracks that greet all visitors, local and interstate, at the entry to Broadmeadows.
“It’s a disgrace,” he said, pointing out the weed-infested sidings littered with rubbish and the waving flowerheads of Scotch thistle.
“We even offered to clean it up for them. We’ve raised the issue and four months later we still haven’t heard. It just staggers me that someone can own land and no one looks after it – we wouldn’t be allowed to get away with that.”
