Who would have thought that cramming Brisbane’s inner-city with tens-of-thousands of new apartments would require additional new infrastructure like schools? The thought clearly didn’t cross the Queensland Government’s mind (who needs schools when apartment dwellers don’t have kids, right?). From The Brisbane Times:
Successive Queensland governments have failed to increase the scope of inner-city schools as new apartments were constructed and families with school-aged children crammed places at inner-city schools.
The biggest impact was on Brisbane State High School, which now has 3190 enrolled students and the crammed West End State School.
But don’t worry, the Queensland Government has the solution in hand. It now plans to retrofit the city by building an expensive new high-rise school in Fortitude Valley, along with another in the inner-south:
Brisbane’s first vertical high school will almost certainly be built in Fortitude Valley by 2020 on the site of the former state school on Brooke Street, Queensland Education Minister Kate Jones says…
Ms Jones said the Valley would likely be home to the state’s first high-rise school.
…in June, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palasazczuk, Deputy Premier Jackie Trad and Ms Jones announced two new high schools for inner-city Brisbane at a cost of $500 million…
Ms Jones has previously said the new schools at Fortitude Valley and in the inner-south would be built with a capacity of 1200 to 1500 each.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? $500 million of taxpayers money to increase school capacity by 2,400 to 3,000 students from 2020?
I just hope the Queensland Government doesn’t plan to stop there because according to the Grattan Institute, Queensland will need to build an additional 197 schools by 2026 to cope with an additional 170,738 (20.4%) students:
All of this, yet again, highlights Australia’s dysfunctional population ponzi in action.
The federal government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ program has committed to an intake of around 200,000 permanent migrants a year ad infinitum, more than double the long-term average:
While most of these extra migrants will choose to settle in Sydney and Melbourne, it does push incumbent residents to migrate internally to Queensland (e.g. to escape Sydney’s high housing costs). And each additional resident needs basic services like schooling, not to mention additional economic infrastructure and housing.
Let’s also not forget that the Turnbull Government recently relaxed visa rules to allow 6 year-old foreign students and their guardians visa entry into Australia’s primary schools, thus adding to the crush-loading.
Instead of always trying (but failing) to catch-up to the infrastructure shortfall by retrofitting our big cities with expensive new projects, why not seek to remove the demand pressures causing the overcrowding in the first place by normalising Australia’s immigration intake?
