After Melbourne last month lost its bogus title of “most liveable city”, the former Victorian executive director of the Property Council of Australia turned Melbourne Lord Mayor, Sally Capp, offered a rare dose of honesty on the primary reason why:
Calling Melbourne a “victim of its own success,” Mayor Capp said the city’s growth had made it harder to meet the liveability criteria.
“You have to remember Vienna has a population of about 1.8 million and our population is now 4.6 million,” she said.
“And when you start to compare with other major cities, London for example rates at 48 in this liveability index, so there are definitely challenges recognised within the index that makes it very hard for cities as they become bigger to be competitive in this particular criteria.”
As I noted at the time, Melbourne’s population is 4.9 million, not 4.6 million – quite a big difference. Still, Capp’s comment did highlight that she understands that Melbourne’s hyper immigration-driven population growth is wrecking liveability.
Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped Sally Capp from spruiking for a ‘Big Australia’, claiming rapid population growth “represents opportunity”. From The Australian:
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp has called on the nation to embrace population growth and change the way new inner-city suburbs are created. She wants our big towns to look more like Sydney’s latest development, Barangaroo, and less like her own city’s troubled Docklands area.
“Population growth represents opportunity and I believe we have the capability and capacity here in Australia, and in Melbourne, to be able to really embrace and harness it,” she said. “The cities we revere around the world … recognise that people mean talent, people mean diversity of ideas. It means we’ve got more capacity to look at new industries, new jobs.”
Opportunity for whom? Certainly not ordinary Melbournians.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. We’ve had 15-years of hyper immigration and the empirical evidence unambiguously shows that liveability has worsened, with pervasive infrastructure bottlenecks, woeful traffic congestion, and eroded housing affordability and quality.
Moreover, the living situation in Melbourne is projected to worsen, according to Infrastructure Australia, as the city’s population balloons to 7.3 million by 2046:
All of which just goes to show: you can take the girl out of the Property Council, but you cannot take the Property Council out of the girl.
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