The Premier of Victoria Dan Andrews, at the launch of the Antipodes Festival, announced $800,000 for the festival over four years – an increase to $200,000 per annum from $150,000.
Andrews said earlier to Neos Kosmos that the support “will provide ongoing certainty to the festival.” The funding was also matched by the leader of the opposition Liberal party, Mathew Guy in his address to the Lonsdale Street crowd.
In an interview with Neos Kosmos to be published this coming week, the Premier said that his “door is open” if the community comes to him with proposals to ensure that Greek is taught at more government schools.
“Ultimately this must be driven by the parents” the Premier told Neos Kosmos.
Andrews said that if “the community want to come together and come to me with a proposal that they think would work to see more students of Greek heritage learning Greek, and would be more convenient for families, and would be cheaper for families, I’ve got a completely open mind to that.”
Premier Andrews was candid on a range of issues, like the “very, very, long nights” he confronted during the two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdowns, when making the “right decisions, not the popular decisions.”
Aware of the impact COVID lockdowns had on small business, the premier related it to his own personal “misfortunes” his family faced when his parents’ business collapsed after the “shop next door caught fire.”
Andrews talked about how he advised his father to “declare bankruptcy” and how his father rejected the idea and went on to “build up again from nothing.”
He went on to say how he knows “what it’s like to have everything you worked for wash away in one moment” before underscoring the raft of COVID support his government announced for small businesses.
He said that as a leader “you can make a popular decision that is popular for week, maybe two, and then the whole thing would unravel and no one will get a hospital bed, not just for COVID, but no hospital bed for a heart attack, for premature babies and cancer treatments.”
The exclusive interview with the Premier of Victoria Dan Andrews will be published this week in Neos Kosmos.
