Victoria Street

Swan Street also is doing very well, right? It's next to the sporting precinct, and its trend just continued as before.

And Victoria Street, where we are here, Council also looked at vacancy data, like how many of the shops along the street are vacant, and did the introduction of free parking for a certain period of time reduce that vacancy? Did more businesses move in? And sadly, there was not really a change, a statistically significant change.

So next one.

And the consultancy sent people in to shops to talk to businesses all along the shopping streets, right? And they asked them, how's the revenue changing? What's the vibe? And the biggest response was they're unsure or they're unwilling to say.

And once you've installed it, the running cost is very low, and you can do that on every shopping street and get real data.

So we suggest instead of spending $1.7 million a year on a trial, let's first put in the census, get a solid baseline, and then do that before we do any trials, just so we can see if there's a real change.

And if you had that kind of money, there's lots of things you could do, right? So in the council meeting coming up tomorrow night, There's an agenda item for let's have street festivals, right? So there's the Victoria Street Festival every year.

There's like the Johnson Street Festival.

I want to look at how scrap metal, how the market works, why it's so lucrative for people to chisel plaques off gravestones and cut out copper pipes from behind churches and houses.

And also last night, my city council, the People's Republic of Yarra, There was a proposal, which was hotly debated, to install more CCTV on Victoria Street, Richmond, in the wake of that firebombing a couple of months ago, which I think has now shut down 10 businesses.

It was tobacco-related.

And for some reason, the city of Yarra has voted it down.

Plenty of calls and emails coming up.

I want to look at metal recycling and why people are prepared to chisel off bronze plaques off gravestones to make an extra dollar.

And we had that terrible firebombing a couple of months ago on Victoria Street in North Richmond.

Something like 10 business premises went up in smoke.