By Tanya Steele
Ahead of the 2025 Election, trackless rapid transport from Caulfield to Rowville, an international airport, affordable housing, jobs, strategy and more made up a region-wide approach proposed by the Greater South East Melbourne (GESM) board.
GSEM launched its federal election platform for 2025 on Wednesday 4 December and with it plans for 12 major projects, including equal growth opportunities for women and youth unemployment.
Chancellor of Monash University Simon McKeon AO said that the platform launch was a blueprint for how GSEM can continue to grow, enhance and enrich the southeast of Melbourne, putting big wishes into a digestible format.
“Few other parts of Australia can boast the richness, the diversity, the productivity, the shared potential of this region,” he said.
“We know there are challenges as well.”
GSEM identified in its platform that the region has higher long-term unemployment than the Melbourne average and ‘concerning rates’ of women’s and youth employment.
“Many of the people who have come to call the region home are not able to access the training, education or jobs they need,” read the document.
Represented by the shires of Cardinia and Mornington Peninsula, the cities of Casey, Frankston, Greater Dandenong, Kingston, Knox and Monash, the eight councils that make up GSEM are focusing on long-ranging issues for the southeast of Melbourne.
Several region-wide projects were brought to the platform focusing on four areas – jobs and skills, infrastructure and transport, housing affordability and availability and liveability and community resilience.
Hosted by Knox City Council at the Civic Centre in Wantirna South the GSEM platform launch saw attendance by independent directors James Merlino, Margaret Fitzherbert and Simon McKeon AO, along with Frankston City Council Director Shweta Babbar, Cardinia Shire Council CEO Carol Jeffs, City of Greater Dandenong CEO Jacqui Weatherill, City of Kingston CEO, Peter Bean and Knox City Council CEO Bruce Dobson.
A call to put into direct play a road map for jobs and skills, a young mothers transition program and an expansion for a Dandenong-based employment hub headed the projects GSEM wants federal assistance to invest in.
Cardinia Shire CEO Carol Jeffs said projects like a working group to develop a master plan for the South East Melbourne Airport, which would be located in Cardinia Shire is important for the whole region and the state of Victoria.
“It’s been talked about for a long time,” she said.
“It’s proposed to be a privately funded airport – we just need government to do their bit in terms of the planning for to make it attractive for private investors to come in.”
“We’ve been working together with the other eight councils through the GSEM, to make sure that other levels of government know about it.”
There is no cost set as yet for the Thompsons Road upgrade and extension project planned for Casey and Cardinia.
“Thompsons Road is a key, huge arterial road that will eventually be built, and we’re asking for some funding to bring that, the building of that forward, so that businesses can benefit,” said Ms Jeffs.
“The main thing about that is that in Casey and Cardinia, more than 70 per cent of people commute outside of our municipalities to work. So something like this would really encourage more local business and have jobs closer to home,” she said.
GSEM have also included plans for the electrification of all homes with a government-backed electrification loan scheme for $5 million and a future-proofing industry project that would activate net zero precincts across all the council locations.
CEO of the South East Councils Climate Change (SECA) Helen Steel said her ambition is that the southeast becomes a net zero precinct.
