Dick Smith has kept the immigration debate fires burning today via an opinion piece published in The SMH, which labels Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy a “risky experiment without parallel among developed nations”:
No one living, working or travelling in Sydney today needs to be reminded of the costs of the unprecedented growth the city has been undergoing. With close to 100,000 people being added each year, we all experience the clogged roads, crowded trains and endless delays. And as we stare out of the window, we can see the face of the city literally changing before our eyes.
Apparently congestion costs the Sydney $6 billion every year, and this is only getting worse. Infrastructure Australia warns we will need to spend billions more just to make up for our current planning failures – let alone what’s coming.
“If you can imagine adding two more cities the size of Melbourne or Sydney to Australia by 2047, you’ll appreciate the enormity of the challenge,” says Infrastructure Australia chairwoman Julieanne Alroe. Except she’s got it wrong. We aren’t building new cities, we are squeezing more and more people into the cities we have. Mostly that means Sydney and Melbourne which together absorb 60 per cent of Australia’s rapidly growing population…
Do any of us really want to live in a city of 8 million? That’s where we are told Sydney is headed by mid-century, as if it’s a foregone conclusion.
Yet no one in power seems prepared to answer a simple question: why? Why are doing this, who benefits and who asked us if this is a good idea? I am yet to see a convincing argument that proves more is better for the majority of people.
In 1998 under John Howard, the Australian Bureau of Statistics predicted we would have a population in 2051 of about 24.9 million. Well, we have already exceeded that number 33 years ahead of schedule which tells you a lot about the quality of long term planning in Australia.
…the politicians have encouraged a massive expansion of our immigration program without seeking our permission…
We should bring our immigration down to the long-term average of about 70,000 per year (as it was during the time of Hawke and Keating) while keeping a generous allocation for refugees.
Bravo. This is the sort of no-nonsense argument that will ultimately win the day – an argument that every person living in one of the major cities can relate to because they live it each and every day.
Remember, Infrastructure Australia’s own report shows that living standards in both Sydney and Melbourne will be badly eroded as their populations balloon to 7.3 million and 7.4 million people respectively by 2046, courtesy of mass immigration. That is, traffic congestion will get even worse, as will access to jobs, schools, hospitals, and green space, regardless of whether these cities build up, build out, or do some combination of the two:
Why knowingly and deliberately wreck living standards by running a mass immigration program if you don’t have to? It’s a direct policy choice how “big” and crowded Australia and our major cities become.
