By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
FINALLY an outlet to buy Greek coffee has opened in central Dandenong – and now MP John Pandazopoulos’s 22-year reign as its local MP comes to an end.
This is the new Dandenong that Mr Pandazopoulos said he has fought for, turning streetscapes of empty shops into a buzzing library, dining and civic square precinct.
“Having places like this, people don’t have to go out of Dandenong to get coffee,” he told the Journal.
“People come to Dandenong for these things now.”
Mr Pandazopoulos said he’d had to burn bridges with his cabinet colleagues when he had to fight for funding in what is a notionally safe Labor seat.
But the push for the $280 million Revitalising Central Dandenong transformation was relatively easy, he said.
It was an obvious needs-based argument to boost the market town that had failed to keep up with the shift to standalone shopping centres or the growth in white-collar jobs.
“Without that government intervention, Dandenong would be dead. The free market wasn’t working in Dandenong.
“Everyone pays their taxes. Why can’t people here get the same services, if not better, than other localities?”
He entered politics determined to be a voice for a low-income, culturally diverse area.
“There’s many struggle-town stories but many stories of hope and opportunity,” he said.
“We’ve got one of the lowest tertiary-education levels but people have had the education of life.
“They still want their voice to be heard, they want barriers to be removed.”
Growing up in Doveton, Mr Pandazopoulos was a beneficiary of the late former PM Gough Whitlam’s free university education policy and of hard-working parents who “worked their butts off” for their kids.
Perhaps surprisingly he is still recognised by many as a manager of former McDonald’s restaurants at the Booran Holden and Dandenong City sites – a job that taught him “the customer is always right” and the need to “get the basics right”.
His career included four ministerial portfolios – part of his brief was to correct cutbacks he’d witnessed while in opposition in the 1990s.
Two of those portfolios – Multiculturalism and Tourism – coincided with some of his major passions.
He said Melbourne’s reputation as a city that was friendly to a range of cultures was an example to the world.
It helped attract untold economic benefits including more international tourists and foreign investment.
He speaks with pride about starting the Docklands adventure, the NGV, the State Library’s domed reading room and Myer Music Bowl developments, and putting the finishing touches to Melbourne Museum.
It’s a list of concrete achievements that he felt were cut short when he was dumped from the front bench in 2006.
At the time he blamed sabotage from his Left faction.
“There’s a lot of things in the world that are not fair,” he said last week.
“The good thing was I didn’t have to knife anybody to get the (portfolios) or suck up to people.”
Mr Pandazopoulos said Dandenong now needed to keep positioning itself as Melbourne’s “second hub”, and to keep promoting the right types of buildings and jobs in the town’s vacant blocks – such as IT, multilingual call-centres and financial services.
“The government needs to ensure it doesn’t move away from the reality that it’s the biggest commercial footprint outside the CBD.”
Mr Pandazopoulos said he knew his time was up.
He had served more than half of his 51-year life in public office, including a seven-year stint as a Berwick councillor.
The Doveton boy has moved to a Southbank apartment and is now ready for the next phase which will involve community work – such as recognising the 80,000 Anzacs who served in Greece in the world wars.
It may include working on corporate boardrooms.
As a tip for the next MP to step into his Halpin Way office, he said: “Your public is your best test on what needs to be done.”
