Via the AFR:
Melbourne’s CBD faces a $110 billion wipe-out over the next five years from its strict lockdown with 79,000 jobs set to be lost across the city in the worst economic, social and mental health disaster for the city since World War 1, PwC modelling from the mayor’s office reveal
An estimated 22,900 jobs will go from accommodation and food services, 6800 will go from education, 8000 from financial services and insurance, and 2300 from retail, among the major job losses in the city alone.
“With thousands of people working from home, our shopping malls, hotels and restaurants have been almost deserted,” Ms Capp said.
“Office workers are a big part of the community in neighbourhoods like Docklands, which is normally home to 72,000 jobs,” she said, noting that the office vacancy rate is up to 5.8 per cent, up from a historically low 3.2 per cent in February.
Sally Capp is a classic real estate buffoon. It’s not the lockdown’s fault. It’s not even the virus’s fault.
It’s her fault. It’s Melbourne’s fault. The CBD has been cruising for this bruising since the GFC. Nowhere else on earth went so all-in on the unsustainable business model of importing foreign students and cheap foreign labour to support a hollowed-out ponzi-economy. MB has marveled for ten years at the staggering build-out of Melbourne highrises, warned constantly of the bulging anus economy, repeatedly described the macro mechanisms at work as the CBD sucked in workers and put suburbs to the sword. Idiot policy leaned into instead of against it at every turn.
In short, Melbourne shallowed its capital base by inundating itself with third world bodies and plumping debt-driven bullshit jobs in any and all directions.
It was the quintessential house of cards. That it happens to have been a pandemic that toppled a tower built on sand is irrelevant. It was always going to come down spectacularly.
Now we will see a decade of oversupply in everything from offices, to malls, to shops, to apartments as the entire idiot idea implodes in the mother of all deflation singularities and there is nothing that can be done to stop it.
