The NSW Government’s fake concern over the dire state of Sydney housing affordability continued yesterday with the release of the State Budget, which included more token measures to boost supply. From Australian Broker:
The NSW Government has announced it will spend more than $720m over the next four years to address the key issue of housing affordability.
“Our number one priority as a government is to get more houses built and to market to help make new homes more affordable,” Minister for Planning and Housing, Anthony Roberts said.
“We are working on many fronts to make owning a home a reality for more people, by streamlining and simplifying the planning system so housing approvals can be fast-tracked and are continuing to release and rezone more land.”
The 2017-18 NSW Budget includes $117.8m over four years of new investment to deliver infrastructure, housing and employment initiatives, review land use and infrastructure strategies for priority growth areas and implement regional plans.
In addition there are address housing affordability by expanding Priority Precincts and Priority Growth Areas to deliver around 30,000 additional dwellings, and to support the reform of Infrastructure Contributions…
“This Government is committed to making housing in NSW more affordable for everyone and this is a responsible and well-targeted budget that will do just that,” Roberts said.
Meanwhile, former Labor leader, Mark Latham, did a great job demolishing this ‘we must boost supply’ view, pinning Sydney’s housing problems primarily on excessive demand, principally via excessive levels of immigration. From The Daily Telegraph:
IN the great debate about housing affordability, a new mantra has emerged on both sides of politics. It’s yet another three-word slogan: “improved urban planning”.
Instead of cutting immigration numbers to bring down housing demand and housing prices, Liberal and Labor are focusing on just one side of the housing market: increased supply.
They want to flood the Sydney basin with wall-to-wall urbanisation.
They are building a vast metropolis, extending to Appin in the southwest and abutting the Blue Mountains in the west.
Most of the growth is concentrated in a new residential corridor between Penrith and Camden — building a city the size of Canberra along the spine of the narrow, two-lane Northern Rd.
This is the snake oil of our time: the fantastic notion that in a city already heavily congested, we can swamp Western Sydney with new arrivals and new suburbs and somehow the magic of “improved urban planning” will produce a metropolitan nirvana.
The head of the Greater Sydney Commission, Lucy Turnbull, has said “we need to plan for an additional 1.74 million people by 2036”, mostly in Sydney’s West.
She’s part of the cheer squad for “improved urban planning”, with “an aspiration for a 30-minute city”, so everyone can live within half-an-hour of his or her workplace.
Tell her she’s dreaming.
The only way Sydney can become a 30-minute city is if the Turnbulls buy everybody a helicopter…
Excuse me, but whenever I hear those words “improved urban planning” I reach for the chuck bucket.
It’s a fraud on our community, and has been for 50 years.
Bob Carr was right.
Sydney is house full.
It will never be a liveable city as long as massive immigration numbers overwhelm our suburbs and clog up our roads.
Why don’t our political leaders understand this reality?
They don’t see the problems because they don’t live near them.
The Big Australia mentality that sustains the nation’s 200,000-plus annual immigration program is the ultimate act of selfishness.
The business lobbyists, economists and MPs pushing for big migration numbers do so safe in the knowledge that overcrowding and congestion will never affect the gentrified, inner-city boroughs in which they live.
They use immigration as a giant Ponzi scheme: artificially pumping up economic growth at a cost to urban efficiency, housing affordability and wages growth.
We need an Australia-first migration program, designed for the benefit of the people who live here, not those wanting to come here.
For Western Sydney, this means abandoning Big Australia and limiting population growth into the region.
Absolutely spot on. Anyone doubting Mark Latham’s claims only needs to read the Productivity Commission’s (PC) recent Migrant Intake into Australia report. This report showed that 86% of immigrants lived in the major cities of Australia in 2011, with Sydney and Melbourne the main magnets:
The PC also explicitly noted that:
- “High rates of immigration put upward pressure on land and housing prices in Australia’s largest cities…”, and
- “Immigration, as a major source of population growth in Australia, contributes to congestion in the major cities…”
By maintaining a permanent migrant program of 200,000 people a year (see next chart), the federal government is all but guaranteeing that it will crush-load Sydney and Melbourne, making housing affordability and congestion worse and destroying incumbent residents’ living standards.
The Sydney-specific highlight the problem. In the 12-years to 2016, Sydney’s population surged by 821,000 (+20%), primarily driven by mass immigration.
And the State Government’s own forecasts have Sydney’s population surging by 87,000 people per year (1,650 people a week) to 6.4 million over the next 20-years – effectively adding another Perth to the city’s population:
You can see from the State Government’s projections above that Sydney’s population would grow by 1.53 million fewer people over the next 20-years with zero net overseas migration. That’s the equivalent of nearly four Canberras that would not need to be built across the city.
Clearly, the best way to alleviate Sydney’s housing and infrastructure woes is for the State Government to demand that the Federal Government slash Australia’s immigration program. Because under current mass immigration settings, incumbent residents of Sydney are facing big cuts to their living standards along with expensive infrastructure bills.
Of course, elites like Lucy and Malcolm Turnbull don’t care, because the bulk of the overcrowding is not projected to occur in wealthy locations like Woollahra, but in the city’s West – home to Sydney’s working class ‘riff raff’ that Mark Latham represents:
Governments can bang on about boosting supply all they want (without actually doing much). But something needs to be done to stem demand, including the deluge of new migrants inundating our big cities every year.
None of this is rocket science. So why won’t our major political parties – the Coalition, Labor and the Greens – address the problem at its source and slash immigration to sensible and sustainable levels? And why won’t our left-leaning media acknowledge the population elephant destroying housing affordability and livability in our major cities?
