But only for the working class stuck on the urban fringe:
Melbourne’s relentless population growth is placing extreme stress on crucial early childhood and health-care services, with fringe growth suburbs bearing the brunt of the pain.
Services such as new maternity hospitals, maternal-and-child-health centres and kindergartens in these areas are not being properly planned for, a report by the auditor-general has found.
Some key providers so underfunded and behind the times that they rely on faxing to provide data to councils and the Victorian government.
Melbourne will grow from 4.6 million people to more than 6 million by the end of the next decade.
And the city’s outer suburbs will soak up 42 per cent of that growth, the report released on Wednesday said.
And here’s the chart from the report:
There’s your class war, right there. Elegant and genteel growth in wealthy areas with no infrastructure strains but no services for the sub-alterns jammed into fringe McMansion ghettos.
If they get underpaid by said class overlords, forget about legal aid. From SBS:
The National Census of Community Legal Centres showed almost 170,000 people were turned away from community legal centres last year, with 75 per cent of those being turned way due to a lack of financial resources.
Of those who did access legal services 15 per cent were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, and 26 per cent came from a multicultural background.
For Karen refugee, Labah Mooree, having access to legal advice through a legal centre outreach program has had a significant impact on his life.
He was working as a cleaner and being underpaid, but it wasn’t until he had access to legal information provided in Karen that he had the confidence to raise the issue with his employer.
“Sometimes [hours I worked on the] weekend or other hours went missing,” Mr Mooree told SBS World News through a translator.
“I know that due to the language barriers that was the cause of the problem. I didn’t know about the problem before, but I knew it was continuing,” he said.
For those lucky enough to make enough money to have kids that survive birth and find early education they’ll not see them anyway, being stuck in traffic, via the Herald Sun:
CRASHES on the West Gate Freeway are expected to double upon completion of the West Gate Tunnel, contrary to claims that the new route will improve safety.
Despite promising to provide quicker and safer journeys and remove thousands of trucks off residential streets, crashes are expected to double from 61 to 117 a year by 2031.
This is due to the increased number of vehicles travelling on the freeway compared with not proceeding with the project. Non-freeway crashes near the M1 corridor will reduce by 30 per cent from 456 to 319.
Transport planner John Kiriakidis, from GTA Consultants, on Wednesday appeared before hearings into the effects of the proposed $5.5 billion toll road through the city’s west.
Remind me, why are we spending the $5.5bn again?
The property parasites are loving it of course, via the ABC:
Victoria is underprepared for its booming population and needs to embrace higher density living if it is to keep up with demand for new homes, the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) has said.
New data from the UDIA found that despite record-high levels of housing development, the state had a shortfall of 9,000 new properties in the past two years.
It said if that trend continued it would lead to an undersupply in excess of 50,000 houses by 2020.
The UDIA’s Victorian chief executive Danni Addison, said there had been a lack of proper planning for Victoria’s population boom by federal, state and local governments.
“The worrying thing is that we have a population growth forecast that is constantly growing and has constantly been under-represented by government agencies and even the ABS,” she said.
“We’re simply not building enough to meed the demands of the population growth we’re seeing here in Melbourne.”
Ms Addison said while the Victorian Government was doing some heavy lifting when it came to improving infrastructure, parts of the community were still fighting against more development.
“The lesson here for industry, government and community is to wake up to the fact that population growth is happening, it’s not something we can stop or change or move elsewhere and we really need to plan better for it,” she said.
“The reality is there are a number of inner suburbs in Melbourne where they are fantastically connected to jobs and services, but density and development is taboo.
Jago Dodson, the director of RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research, said it was not as simple as just building more homes.
“I think we’re facing some real difficulties with the model we’ve pursued of continued fringe area expansion, because although people are buying new houses in those growth areas, we’re not seeing the jobs following them.”
“Long commutes from a far-flung outer suburb won’t necessarily enhance people’s productivity and they contribute to other kinds of social stress,” he said.
He said Melbourne needed to build more homes closer to good employment, which was often based in the inner city, but also take those jobs out of the city to the suburbs.
Professor Dodson said part of Melbourne’s economic strategy had been to ensure land on the city’s fringe was cheaper than Sydney, to attract more people and boost the economy.
“We need to start asking whether that’s good enough for a 21st century economy, to rely on population growth, that’s not a particularly sophisticated economic strategy, and we need to be thinking through the implications of that for the sustainability for our metropolitan economy,” he said.
He said government needed to capture the economic gains from population growth to put it back into the community through an initiative like a land tax.
“Because of the population growth and the desire to live close to good-quality infrastructure and employment, we’ve seen very rapid growth in house prices in inner and middle zones,” he said.
“A land tax would enable us to invest in new affordable housing stock so that the areas that are wealthier, [which] have seen high house price inflation, don’t become enclaves for wealthy households, that we still obtain a degree of social mix.”
Give Professor Dodson a cigar. The UDIA is the developer’s lobby and should be ignored at every turn. We can’t “stop or change population growth”? Cripes, what is it, a directive from God? Zero net migration would see population stabilise at 27 million all the way out to 2060 (see next chart). UDIA’s only goal is to create supply pressure to support its funders, which includes driving up land costs in the fringe for its land-banked buddies.
Professor Dodson is exactly right. The model is dumb and corrupt. It privatises profits for chosen sectors while passing the costs to everyone else. Not only that, it is a gigantic class war.
At least if you’re stressed about it you can go get a very handily priced happy ending:
ANOTHER illegal brothel masquerading as a massage parlour has been ordered to shut down.
The doors to Fire Banana at 11 Balcombe Rd, Mentone will be closed for three months after Magistrate Thomas Barrett declared the premises a proscribed brothel.
The ruling comes amid a spate of independent investigations commissioned by Kingston Council, which has already taken action against two other illegal brothels in the suburb.
“Council is taking positive action in response to growing community concerns about illegal brothels operating in Kingston,” acting planning and development general manager Ian Nice said.
“We have successfully taken legal action against a number of illegal brothels in recent months, following inspections carried out by independent investigators.”
