They call America the Land of the Free; it’s right there in the New York Times small print. But the real land of the free is Victoria where everything is free: free public transport, free school breakfasts, free kinder, free steak knives…. Only our traffic stop sign holders aren’t free, they earn 200k per annum. It’s just the sort of private Idaho I want.

Our new state Treasurer is a law-humanities major. Like me, she doesn’t like economic jargon. I think she may be a fellow frustrated creative type with a typewriter, AI app and ABN, roaming the range though in her case economic policy is her Grapes of Wrath. Revealing her inner Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho (surely you have an unread copy of The Alchemist in your bookcase?) her Victorian budget gets creative, rebranding the costly suburban rail loop as a housing project before it turns into a unicorn and flies off to Argentina. We literary types call this magic realism, a literary form you write in jail waiting for Amnesty to return your phone call and once popular in bankrupt Latin American dictatorships.

In the land of the free not everything is how it seems, though it is also so predictable you can set your phony TAG Heuer sports watch to it: if they’re ram-raiding the chrome and glass luxury Burberry store on Collins Street at 3a.m., it must be Tuesday.

Last week Armani, this week Burberry, next week Chanel. If it wasn’t for the low IQ of these misunderstood, repeatedly bailed 16-year-old offenders, I’d be sure they’re robbing these stores in alphabetical order. Oscar Wilde once said, youth is wasted on the young, but what would he know? Has he’s ever experienced the rush of driving a stolen BMW into a luxury retailer and demanding the maître d’ hand over all the Fabergé eggs during Fashion Week?

Melbourne’s gangly hipster-bearded Mayor Nicholas Reece demands action on youth crime. He throbs with an inner barista glow, the ink of black espresso courses through his veins. He was a regular on Sky After Dark, but also Julia Gillard’s chief of staff, so the left love-hate him like when they talk about Bob Hawke. He is demanding action. He wants more bollards, lots and lots of bollards. The Clayton’s of law and order action. The erectile dysfunction of political discourse. He does have other ideas; an AI surveillance solution to get down with the kids, doubling down on his predecessor’s cycling paths fetish – after all it is harder to smash and grab on a bicycle while balancing paint spray cans and the knife you bought online. He needs to go the extra creative yards: maybe install heating coils in the Burberry bollards so the nearby Elizabeth Street homeless move away from outside the graffitied tram terminus and dishevelled McDonalds to upmarket Collins Streeet where they can curl their tattooed bodies round the brutalist concrete lump and dream about their childhoods.

Bollards have their use. Every morning in midtown Melbourne, a thin busker in corduroys, his mouth smoking in the refrigerated Melbourne air, sets his old amplifier up next to the concrete bollard on the Bourke Street Mall outside the former GPO building now repurposed for private school H&M shoppers with their generous grandmothers. Wearing old army surplus goggles and heavy navy blue overcoat, he plugs in his electric guitar and turns the volume to 11 while nervous quota-chasing Health and Safety inspectors measure the invisible decibels with their black aluminium sound meters. He doesn’t sing but everybody knows the words to the jarring chords of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control…

He never speaks, or sings. The goggles give him a blank, faceless anonymity like a 1977 anti-Malcolm Fraser Resistance poster. He is probably pro-bollard, but in this brave new political world who knows.  There is a tip jar in his open guitar case and burned CDs you can buy. But hey, this is Melbourne and the culture so embedded –give it an hour and someone under the age of 14 will steal them.

So many options, so little time. What does the man in the street think about all this? And by the man in the street, I also mean woman, just to get that clear. Well, they mostly say, bollards are bollocks. But then again they also want to abolish other Melbourne iconography – hook turns, mega tram stops, high-speed Uber cyclists who cut in front of you, the phrase ‘release on bail’ in court documents.

Maybe we don’t want to listen to the man in the street, who is angrier than you think, especially if his local tobacconist has recently burnt down in a crime of passion. Looking drunk and lost late Friday night as he wanders a windswept Kings Street searching for his youth, Spearmint Rhino or both (generational regret is complicated). Pining for a Melbourne that like his second marriage no longer exists. Asking, ‘Didn’t this used to be Inflation?’

Let’s ask the voice of reason instead. Much safer. The voice of reason went to Melbourne Grammar but now swings left and is the swerving voice in your head that sounds like Christopher Pyne or a self-driving Tesla robotically saying ‘avoid potholes’ as you head down the Nepean Highway to your Portsea pile. But if you don’t like what you’re hearing from the voice of reason you can always try the sensible centre. The sensible centre wears a velvet lounge jacket and has a lot of well-to-do friends who got rich during the 2020-21 Covid white goods boom. They’re kind of boring (money can do that to you) but have their finger on the pulse which is really just them checking to see if Victoria can be resuscitated or just used as a carbon sink.

I often wonder what the man in the street, voice of reason and sensible centre get up to in their spare time. Go fishing? Rebuild old Holdens and sell them on eBay? Or do they just get an overpriced suite at the Park Hyatt, work their way through the minibar and complimentary pretzels before having sex? And if they do, are they taking the necessary precautions?