When it comes to ‘Big Australia’ shills, you would be hard pressed to find a bigger rent-seeker than Dr Shane Geha, managing director of EG – “a leading real estate investment fund manager” – whose business profits directly from mass immigration. According to their website:
As founding Managing Director of EG’s Urban Planning business, Shane bears overall responsibility for all EG’s rezoning projects. Shane has extensive rezoning experience and brings a combination of practical know-how and value creation skills to projects he is involved in.
He was previously a director of a private company managing over AU$200 million in property development in NSW and the ACT.
Geha’s LinkedIn profile also tells us that he’s up to his neck in the ‘rezoning’ business:
His focus is working closely with clients on property uplift strategy and implementation and has worked on multiple rezoning projects including some of the largest land use changes in both size and value in Sydney and New South Wales.
Geha’s vested interest has been exposed previously by MB (here and here).
With this background in mind, Shane Geha has spouted more propaganda at Domain, claiming that more immigration is necessary to “bust congestion”:
A recent Infrastructure Australia report found that our four largest cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – were set to become paralysed by congestion within the next 12 years, citing they were “failing to keep pace with rapid population growth, particularly on the urban fringe”. Congestion was projected to double during that time.
Sydney and Melbourne would feel it the most – the report stated they’d likely shoulder almost two-thirds of the burden.
Despite this, managing director of EG Urban Development Dr Shane Geha said further increasing the population of these cities by encouraging rapid migration was the answer.
“Spending money on infrastructure to make things better is always a truism”… He said while encouraging migration and rapidly increasing the population of our major cities might sound counterproductive to decreasing congestion, it was the most logical way to do it…
“My position is that it’s easy to talk about building new infrastructure but to build first-class infrastructure you need billions of dollars… The better way to do it is bring more people in, put them in our cities, make them part of our communities and get them paying tax. As soon as they’re paying tax you can use that to pay for infrastructure”…
“Everyone is scared of density but it’s the friend of a well-planned city”…
“Bring them here, accommodate them quickly in our cities, build our infrastructure quickly. You might need to borrow a little bit at the time but that can be paid back quicker than borrowing the whole amount … and we’d be creating the next generation of a beautiful city.”
You don’t solve alcoholism by drinking more. You don’t solve diabetes by upping your sugar intake. And you certainly don’t solve congestion by raising demand via importing more people.
The fact of the matter is that Australia has run a turbo-charged migrant intake for more than 15 years with obvious results: roads, public transport, schools and hospitals have all become over-crowded despite record infrastructure investment. Upping the migrant intake even further, and expecting infrastructure to magically improve, is the very definition of insanity.
Infrastructure Australia’s modelling for Sydney and Melbourne unambiguously disproves Geha’s propaganda. As shown below, traffic congestion, commute times, and access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space are all projected to worsen as Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations balloon to 7.4 million and 7.3 million people respectively by 2046:
All of which reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s famous quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
