Geelong's broken promises: no fire station, no hospital, no new school

Sherryn Vessey's home in Mount Duneed, in Geelong's fast-growing south, sits in the middle of a promise graveyard. Labor pledged a fire station, an ambulance station and a new secondary school within a couple of kilometres of her house across the past two election campaigns. Ground has not been broken on any of them. Land has been held for a future secondary school for more than a decade, and the site is still bare — so next year her eldest child will catch a bus into Geelong for high school instead of walking to one nearby.

The map gets worse further out. About 8km south, a community hospital was promised in 2018. About 8km north, a 2022 promise to find a new home for a small homelessness service. Neither has happened. Geelong was also meant to host the Commonwealth Games, with an athlete's village and a new pool within walking distance of Ms Vessey's home, until the Games and the pool were dumped. She reckons you could take a little radar around the area and plot the lot. Her list: the athlete's village, the hospital, the fire station, the ambulance station, the swimming pool. As she puts it, she could keep going.

The Outpost is the clearest case. During the 2022 campaign, then-premier Daniel Andrews came to Geelong and promised to rescue the homelessness charity after it lost its venue, saying his re-elected government would find a permanent home for Outpost free of charge. Four years on, the charity has been forced into a commercial lease because no permanent home has been found. Government briefings show it needed to either pay the lease or find the charity a new home to consider the commitment kept — and it has done neither.

The fire station has its own history. After a 2017 Boxing Day house fire killed a woman in Armstrong Creek, the government committed to building a station as quickly as possible. Emergency Services Minister James Merlino told the Geelong Advertiser in mid-2018 that the government was working quickly to find a location, calling it an absolute priority and saying it was unacceptable for a growing community to be less protected than it should be. The government then bought land for the station — and sold it off. There is no timeline on when or where one will be built, and a fire truck now sits behind temporary fencing near the land it originally bought. A promised ambulance station was forecast for completion in 2026 in the 2023–24 state budget; the most recent budget pushed that back to 2028.

The Torquay community hospital was promised in 2018, and in 2022 Labor politicians invited media to photograph them turning the sod on land it had acquired. The project has since vanished from government websites, and ministers won't give a straight answer on whether it has been ditched for good. Signs for Torquay Hospital still stand at a site that remains an empty paddock. The ABC sent a detailed list of questions to Premier Ben Carroll, who did not respond; a government spokesperson said Geelong and the Bellarine deserve high-quality public services and pointed to billions invested in rail, road, hospitals, schools and frontline services, adding there is more to do.