We already know that Melbourne has experienced insane levels of population growth over the past 13 years, driven by mass immigration:
And that the lion’s share of this population growth has taken place in the outer suburbs of the city:
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Yesterday, the Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS) reported that Melbourne’s outer western, northern and south-eastern suburbs are rife with poverty:
Figure 2 shows the regions with the highest poverty rates tended to cluster in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The areas with the lowest levels of poverty were also primarily clustered in and around Melbourne…
In Melbourne’s outer western, northern and south-eastern suburbs (Wyndham, Melton, Casey, Hume and Cardinia), the common ‘face of poverty’ is a family struggling to get by…
In the council areas of Cardinia, Frankston, Melton, Mornington Peninsula and Moorabool, single parents were the most likely to live in poverty.
Economist Peter Brain, transport expert Professor John Stanley and social resilience researcher Janet Stanley from Melbourne University also last month presented research warning that Melbourne has become divided into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, again with the migrant-stuffed outer-suburban areas most disadvantaged:
[The research] found the average income received by residents of working age in six council areas on Melbourne’s fringe – Cardinia, Casey, Hume, Melton, Whittlesea and Wyndham – was in 1992 above the state average. By 2017, wages in those areas had fallen to 21 per cent below the Victorian average.
The six outer-urban council areas identified are where population growth has been strongest in Melbourne, along with the city centre.
The fall in average income was, in part, due to people being unable to easily access well-paid jobs, and because of the difficulty of getting around suburbs without adequate roads and public transport.
“It shows without a shadow of a doubt that when your population growth is over 2 or 2.5 per cent a year you really needed to have substantial investment in infrastructure,” Professor John Stanley said… Professor Stanley added that there needs to be a “community conversation about a sustainable rate of population growth”.
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When I worked at the Victorian Treasury in 2006, the Government had recently released “Melbourne 2030”, which projected that Melbourne’s population would reach 5 million people by 2030. In 2010, the Government released “Melbourne Beyond 5 million”, which projected that Melbourne would add one million people in 15 years and warned that the city was not ready for this growth.
As we all know, Melbourne has smashed those projections, hitting 5 million people in 2018, 12 years earlier than projected in Melbourne 2030, after adding a whopping 600,000 people in just the five years to 2017, thanks primarily to the federal government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy:
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Mass immigration economic apartheid is dividing Melbourne. And it’s only going to get worse according to Infrastructure Australia’s recent modelling, which shows that as Melbourne’s population surges to a projected 7.3 million people by 2046, traffic congestion and access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space will all materially worsen regardless of how the city is built-out:
The only genuine solution to protecting Melbourne’s liveability is to lower immigration and prevent the city from transforming into a giant Asian-style mega-city.
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.
