With Sydney having hit permanent peak hour:
And the city being transformed into a high-rise ‘battery chook’ farm:
“Suffocating Sydneysiders” are rising up against overdevelopment, according to The SMH:
Look around Sydney and you’ll see battles being waged in nearly every suburb between residents’ action groups and the state government. From Penrith to Bondi the warzones are green spaces, heritage buildings and community facilities. The terms of conflict are consistent: the government is attempting to override local opposition to overdevelopment in underserviced suburbs…
The common refrain by those whose commercial interest is interrupted by these groups is to accuse them of NIMBYism, naive tree-huggers unaware of economic imperatives. Developers argue that they are responding to demand fuelled by Australia’s soaring population. People must live somewhere. Do you want house prices to rise even higher by stymieing supply?
The false dilemma of “houses or heritage” positions preservation of our history as an obstruction to progress. The question we must ask is whether the plan for a city is viable when liveability requires carnage. In Parramatta, the community’s answer is increasingly becoming “no”. When the community discovered that the plan to move the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta required the demolition of the 150-year-old Willow Grove and St George’s Terraces, to be replaced by two 50-plus storey tower blocks, local opposition exploded. The North Parramatta Residents’ Action Group petition secured more than 10,000 signatures in a week.
This was a “no” to not just the destruction of heritage buildings, but a revolt against a government deciding what your neighbourhood will look like and who will profit from it. All across Sydney people feel underserviced, overcrowded, dwarfed by high-rises, squished into train carriages, smothered by streets flooded with cars and crammed onto toll roads.
Willow Grove is only one of many speed bumps in the government’s quest to flatten and rebuild Australia’s largest city. It’s not too soon (nor too late) to ask what the future of Australia looks like.
Protesting against overdevelopment is pointless unless the problem is addressed at its source.
The fundamental driver is obviously the federal Government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy, which has increased Sydney’s population by nearly one million people over the past 13 years and is projected to increase the city’s population by 1.74 million over the next 20-years (three quarters coming via net overseas migration):
Infrastructure Australia has already told us that under every build-out scenario for Sydney, traffic congestion will deteriorate further, as will access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space:
The quality of life that Sydneysiders have enjoyed for generations is being destroyed before our very eyes. And for what? To service the needs of the ‘growth lobby’ pulling our governments’ strings?
In all our days tracking Australian economics and politics, we have never seen a policy vision so destructive to our living standards.
