A few months back, it was reported that Sydney has been economically segregated into two, with privileged white collar workers located in the north and east of the city (above the ‘latte line’), and the poorer working class located in the south and west (below the ‘latte line’):
The ‘latte line’ is an imaginary boundary that splits Sydney down class and economic lines, running from the airport north-west through Parramatta.
A paucity of public transport options running south to north of the line slows connections to white collar jobs, defined as managers and professionals, research from Western Sydney University shows.
North Sydney had the highest rate of white-collar jobs at 65 per cent of workers, while less than 10 per cent of people working there did blue-collar or manual work, 2016 Census data shows. The highest rate of blue-collar jobs, defined as labourers, machine operators and tradies, was in western Sydney at Erskine Park where 60 per cent of people did blue-collar work and just 17 per cent were employed as managers or professionals.
Associate Professor at Western Sydney University Chyi Lin Lee said white-collar jobs, in general, are concentrated in the north and east of the city in places such as North Sydney, Macquarie Park and Norwest Business Park, while blue-collar jobs are mainly located in the south and west.
Public transport connections from south to north are poor, which hampers access to many white-collar jobs, Prof Lee said…
University of Western Sydney lecturer in human resource management Dr Youqing Fan said there is a division in job concentration along the latte line in Sydney, and it matches patterns seen around the world.
Migrants from rural regions who move to cities in China mostly live in segregated areas far away from the city centre and major employment hubs, which costs them extra money and time to commute to their workplaces and also limits their employment options, Dr Fan said.
Yesterday, Domain published research ranking urban amenity, which showed a similar pattern:
Suburbs with the lowest scores were overwhelmingly in the city’s west and south west, with Glendenning, Blackett and West Hoxton among the bottom performers.
“It does mirror the socio-economic map of Sydney,” said Professor Susan Thompson, from the University of NSW’s City Futures Research Centre. “While Sydney’s western suburbs may be more affordable … they’re not cheap in terms of the long commute and the problems that means for health.”
“[The divide] also mirrors where we’ve got a lot of new residential sites, where there has been a tendency to cut all the trees down because that’s the easiest, quickest and presumably most efficient way to build houses, but ultimately it’s not efficient … it’s causing all these health problems which, as a community, we have to pay for.”
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The Southern and Western suburbs received the lion’s share of Sydney’s population growth via immigration over the past 10 years:
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And they are projected to receive the lion’s share of Sydney’s 1.74 million projected population increase over the next 20 years:
The Western Sydney ghetto is designed to provide cheap foreign labour to the East so that interest rates remain low enabling the East to profit from the rentier services of over-priced ghetto apartments and postage stamp houses, inflated land banks, as well as mortgages and retail by volume.
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Mark Latham described the Western Sydney ghetto as follows:
“[Our politicians] want to flood the Sydney basin with wall-to-wall urbanisation.
They are building a vast metropolis, extending to Appin in the southwest and abutting the Blue Mountains in the west.
Most of the growth is concentrated in a new residential corridor between Penrith and Camden — building a city the size of Canberra along the spine of the narrow, two-lane Northern Rd.
This is the snake oil of our time: the fantastic notion that in a city already heavily congested, we can swamp Western Sydney with new arrivals and new suburbs and somehow the magic of “improved urban planning” will produce a metropolitan nirvana…
It will never be a liveable city as long as massive immigration numbers overwhelm our suburbs and clog up our roads…
The business lobbyists, economists and MPs pushing for big migration numbers do so safe in the knowledge that overcrowding and congestion will never affect the gentrified, inner-city boroughs in which they live…
We need an Australia-first migration program, designed for the benefit of the people who live here, not those wanting to come here.
For Western Sydney, this means abandoning Big Australia and limiting population growth into the region”.
It’s a deliberate kind of economic apartheid system and it’s only going to get worse as millions more migrants are packed like sardines into the West.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
