Former planning ministers abandon population ponzi

By Leith van Onselen

With Melbourne’s and Sydney’s populations growing at a break-neck pace (see below charts), creating all manner of problems from chronic congestion to deteriorating housing affordability, former planning ministers from both states have questioned the efficacy of the federal government’s mass immigration program.

In late 2015, in a great twist of irony, one of the people responsible for the proliferation of high rise dog boxes across Melbourne – former planning Minister (now Opposition Leader) Matthew Guy – had a Damascus moment and questioned the merits of high immigration into Melbourne:

“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?”

Then in May 2016, Guy went even further claiming that “managing population growth is Victoria’s biggest challenge”:

Every year Victoria’s population grows by the size of a packed MCG… 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…

Then in November 2016, Guy returned 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…

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…

And last month, Matthew Guy warned of a congestion crisis and called for a broad population debate:

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said Melbourne had a congestion crisis…

“The Government thinks that adding the population of Brisbane to Melbourne within the next 20 years can be accommodated simply by building one railway tunnel and dipping a few level crossings,” he said.

Mr Guy, who yesterday fronted a population forum in Bulleen, said the nation needed a population debate because it was the “biggest issue on Australians’ minds”.

“It’s a healthy thing to have … I don’t think we should shut down any Australian who wants to have a debate about the kind of Australia we want to be,” he said…

Lord Mayor Robert Doyle said: “Everyone hates congestion. It wastes precious time, frustrates people and hinders productivity.”

Enter former NSW Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, who on Friday pushed-back against the federal government’s blind march towards a ‘Big Australia’ and called for a national population strategy:

Education Minister Rob Stokes said the state government was left trying to retrofit the NSW’s infrastructure and services to an expanding population, without a clear, transparent trajectory of NSW’s future population.

“It’s impossible to plan if you don’t know what you are planning for,” Mr Stokes said. “There’s no overarching narrative of where we are going.”

A former planning minister, Mr Stokes said states were at the mercy of the federal government’s migration policies while bearing the bulk of the infrastructure costs associated with adapting to a growing population.

“Whether it’s planning for patient beds, medical services, the number of new schools and where they are located, housing affordability, or transport routes, ultimately we are planning in the dark if we don’t know what the population is going to do.

“Why are we frightened about having a policy on this? We have policies on everything else.”

The Turnbull government needed to lead on the issue by putting it on the national agenda, he said, and bringing states on board to devise a long-term strategy.

“If we don’t do it, the shape of our country will not change. Development will continue to hug the coast, our major cities will continue to increase in size and the imbalance in our population will continue to accelerate.”

The massive increase in Australia’s immigration program from the early-2000s was mismanaged from the get-go.

And anyone that lives in Sydney or Melbourne will agree that living standards are being eroded, with roads, public transport, schools and hospitals all crush-loaded and housing becoming hideously expensive.

The situation is set to deteriorate further if Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations grow as projected by each respective State Government.

According to these projections, Melbourne will add on average 97,000 people per year (1,870 people per week) for the next 35 years – adding the equivalent of around 9 Canberras or 2.5 Adelaides to the city’s population:

Sydney’s population is also projected to grow by 87,000 people per year (1,650 people per week) to 6.4 million over the next 20-years, which would effectively add a Perth to the city’s population:

Both cities are currently growing at rates well above these projections.

The uncomfortable truth is that the settlement pattern of new migrants into Sydney and Melbourne has become extreme over the past five years, according to the latest Census. As noted by Tim Colebatch:

…the third wave of migration we are seeing now is almost completely city-centric. In Sydney on census night, the 224,685 Chinese migrants… But in the rest of New South Wales, with its 2.65 million people, the census found just 9578 Chinese migrants. Only 4.2 per cent of those in New South Wales live outside Sydney.

Sydney is also home to 96.3 per cent of the state’s Vietnamese-born population, 97.4 per cent of its Iraqi migrants, and 97.6 per cent of its Lebanese…

Migrants to Victoria are similarly concentrated in Melbourne. The few square kilometres ruled by the Melbourne City Council houses four and a half times as many Chinese-born residents as the 210,000 square kilometres of regional Victoria, which includes cities like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Melbourne is home to 97.2 per cent of Victoria’s Chinese migrants, 96.8 per cent of its Sri Lankans, 94.9 per cent of its booming Indian-born population, and 98.0 per cent of its Vietnamese…

Migrants usually flock to the cities. It’s natural that newcomers go where they have friends or family. But what we are seeing now is that natural tendency carried to extreme lengths.

The concerns raised by the former planning ministers have been echoed by former treasury secretary, Ken Henry, who last year sounding the alarm that rapid population growth has overrun infrastructure and housing in the big cities:

“My observation in Sydney, in Melbourne, today is that people already think – with very good reason – that the ratio of population to infrastructure is too high,” he said.

Australia will need to construct a new city every year as big as Canberra or Newcastle to accommodate the expanding number of people, he said. Or, every 5 years,

Australia would need to build an entire new city from scratch for 2 million people; or an entire new city as big as Melbourne every decade.

Without such action, there will be more congestion, longer commute times to work and increasing problems with housing affordability…

Pro-immigration advocate, George Megalogenis, has also noted that the settlement patterns into Sydney and Melbourne are “potentially catastrophic”:

“If most of the population growth that’s already in train for the next 10, 20, 30 years ends up in Sydney and Melbourne, we’ve got a problem…

“You look at Sydney’s topography and it can’t fit another million people easily. And you look at Melbourne’s, and it will fit in another million but at the expense of livability because they just keep pushing the boundary out…

“The default setting to me could potentially be catastrophic for the country over the next 20 years if people just end up in Melbourne and Sydney”.

How do our federal politicians propose that our state governments provide all of the economic and social infrastructure necessary to accommodate such rabid population growth in Melbourne and Sydney? Because the experience over the past 12 years of mass immigration has been one of monumental failure.

The reality is that maintaining a mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy means that Sydney and Melbourne will continue to be crush-loaded as their populations swell by the millions, placing extreme further pressure on infrastructure and housing, and destroying living standards for incumbent residents.

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