The former Victorian executive director of the Property Council of Australia turned Melbourne Lord Mayor, Sally Capp, continues to flip-flop on the immigration-driven population crush afflicting Melbourne.
Last month we were told by Capp to embrace a ‘Big Australia’ because it “represents opportunity”:
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? Property developers? Certainly not ordinary Melbournians.
Over the weekend, Capp flipped the script and admitted that Melbourne’s liveability has been crushed by runaway population growth:
“WE DIDN’T get everything right”. That’s how Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp describes planning in the fastest growing city in the southern hemisphere as traffic crawls, commuters squeeze on to cramped trains and the population pushes, unabating, towards six million people.
She said “hard lessons” are still being learned about why our cities are bursting at the seams. “Our most painful lesson is our most expensive,” Ms Capp told an audience at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt on Friday.
“It’s the impractical way that we have to play catch-up on essential infrastructure. We’re all feeling the pain as we retrofit our train network and grapple, now more than ever, with housing affordability issues.
“There are things we don’t like — crowded roads and public transport and homelessness”…
Ms Capp said there was a disconnect between planning and population growth and that metropolitan planning now needs “a complete reset”… “Federal and state governments need to work hand-in-hand with local governments to unlock investment and co-ordinate funding.”
Federal and state governments magically working “hand-in-hand with local governments”, hey Sally? We are more likely to see pigs flying backwards.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Melbourne has 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 significantly worsen irrespective of how the city builds-out, according to Infrastructure Australia, as the city’s population balloons to a projected 7.3 million by 2046:
We can’t “plan” our way out of this mess: Melbourne living standards will continue to be crushed as long as this mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ madness continues.
