Incessant claims that Australia just needs to ‘plan better’, invest more and build more, ignore the increasingly costly and constrained options for further infrastructure in the face of such unprecedented numbers of people pouring into our major cities.
In already built-out cities like Sydney and Melbourne, the cost of retrofitting new infrastructure to accommodate greater population size and densities becomes prohibitively expensive as we buy back, bridge over or tunnel under existing assets, and as each new project disrupts more heavily-trafficked services causing greater productivity losses. These are what economists call ‘dis-economies of scale’.
The Productivity Commission has been at the forefront highlighting the huge infrastructure costs associated with excessive population growth.
