Late last year, in a great twist of irony, one of the people responsible for the proliferation of high rise development across Melbourne – former planning Minister (now Opposition Leader) Matthew Guy – had a Damascus moment and questioned the merits of high immigration into Melbourne. From The Age:
Mr Guy said with the city’s population continuing to rapidly expand, it was time for a discussion involving the community, businesses and political leaders…
“I think there has got to be a genuine community, business and governance discussion about how we really focus on building the population of our regions, because I am very, very sure that the four-and-a-half million people of Melbourne think … our city is bursting,” Mr Guy said. “Can you imagine it with another million people on top of this, as it will be within 15 years time?”
And in May, Matthew Guy went even further penning a detailed article in the Herald-Sun claiming that “managing population growth is Victoria’s biggest challenge”:
Every year Victoria’s population grows by the size of a packed MCG.
One hundred thousand new people are added to our state every 12 months and 92 per cent of them are headed towards Melbourne.
So it is no wonder that strained and congested infrastructure is something Victorians experience every day…
Our roads are clogged, our trains are full and we can’t get inside trams let alone find a seat on one.
Managing the growth of our population is the biggest challenge Victoria faces today…
Yesterday, Guy returned penning another piece in the Herald-Sun claiming that almost doubling Melbourne’s population to 8 million is unsustainable and calling for population growth to be shifted to the regions:
All of Melbourne’s problems are intrinsically linked to this [population] growth, and it requires a government of vision and purpose to adequately respond to these challenges for the sake of us all.
Our vision for Victoria is a state of cities, not a city state.
We want a growing and liveable Melbourne but not a Melbourne that has doubled by 2051.
And we want our regional centres to share in the opportunities this growth can bring if managed responsibly.
That is why, in April, we announced the Victorian Population Policy Taskforce, representing a whole-of-government approach, to turn Victoria’s huge population growth from a burden into an opportunity…
They have one question to answer: how do we take the pressure off Melbourne by growing country Victoria?…
For too long, governments have ignored decentralisation… An effective decentralisation agenda is crucial to underpinning our desire to improve Melbourne’s liveability and economic growth of the regions…
In a separate Herald-Sun article, also published yesterday, Guy elaborated further:
“Victoria is going to become one great big city state with a great heaving metropolis in the middleof it and nothing else – it’s not sustainable…”
“I don’t think the vast majority of Melbournians want a city of eight million people. They want a liveable city”…
He is not calling for a cut to immigration, which is a federal matter. But he wants much more of the population growth diverted to regional centres such as the Latrobe Valley, Wangarratta, Bendigo, Bairnsdale, and Warrnambool.
Meanwhile, Labor Planning Minister, Richard Wynne, remains a deluded unabashed supporter of a Melbourne Metropolis:
Planning Minister Richard Wynne said the Andrews Government didn’t have a problem with a Melbourne of eight million people.
“This government is unambiguously a supporter of population growth and diversity… End of story”.
“It should not be seen as a threat. It should be seen as an opportunity. The challenge for us is how do we manage it”.
Matthew Guy is wise to identify excessive population growth (immigration) as the key issue facing Melbourne, whereas Labor is foolish to ignore it.
According to the State Government’s own forecasts, Melbourne’s population is projected to balloon by 3,396,000 people in the 35 years to 2051, growing by 97,000 people each year. That’s the equivalent of around 9 Canberras or 2.5 Adelaides – an unsustainable situation no matter which way you cut it.
While satirical, The Shovel has posted a clever piece capturing the mood of Melbourne being destroyed by over-development and the population ponzi:
The city of Melbourne will be rebuilt piece by piece after an embarrassing blunder that saw the entire city ruined by developers.
Once a beautiful late nineteenth century masterpiece, the city is now a pile of rubble and debris, a spokesperson from the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) said. “Look at it now. It’s a toilet. We’re going to find the idiots who did this and make them put it back the way it was”.
Developers claim they didn’t realise what they were doing. “One minute we’re just standing around with our tools, the next we’ve accidentally constructed a thousand shitty dog boxes,” one developer said.
Premier Dan Andrews vowed to find the ‘money-crazed dickheads’ who made the unfortunate mistake. “They’re not above the law,” he said.
That said, Guy’s prescription of shifting population growth to the regions is not necessarily achievable nor desirable if all it means is that ‘urban sprawl’ is replaced by ‘regional sprawl’ as the regions simply become commuter towns for Melbourne. As argued by the Urbanist Alan Davies:
Decentralisation is one of those enduring aspirations Australian politicians love. It’s an almost magical idea; it promises to relieve the big cities of diseconomies of scale – especially the unpopular pressure to redevelop established suburbs – and simultaneously boost the economic prospects of declining country towns…
But it’s political make-believe; decentralisation has never worked in modern Australia on any sort of scale…
The key problem with decentralisation policy is it’s almost impossible to get employers to relocate from big cities to regional centres…
What Mr Guy is proposing is proposing isn’t decentralisation; it’s regional sprawl. His idea is to send a large part of Melbourne’s population growth to regional dormitory suburbs instead of fringe suburbs…
Is regional sprawl a better idea than fringe sprawl?..
I will add that Guy is conveniently hedging his bets in arguing against a cut to immigration on the grounds that it is a federal matter. This is a cop-out.
There is nothing to stop Victoria’s politicians from lobbying their federal counterparts to reduce immigration on the grounds that is is placing undue strain on infrastructure and housing, and is reducing living standards of incumbent residents.
Victoria’s politicians should also lobby for a greater share of tax revenues on the grounds that they are incurring the lion’s share of the costs from immigration, in the form of providing expensive infrastructure and social services.
Finally, Victoria’s politicians should follow Vancouver’s lead and dramatically raise taxes on non-permanent resident Melbourne home owners in a bid to divert growth away from the capital city as well as raise much-needed tax revenue to fund growth-related infrastructure and services.
To Matthew Guy’s credit, he has at least recognised that Melbourne’s population growth is both unsustainable and unwanted. But he needs better solutions to ameliorate the situation.
Labor, by contrast, needs to open its eyes. Few Melbournians want a city of 8 million people. The one we have got is barely functioning properly at 4.5 million.
