Newly elected Melbourne Lord Mayor and vocal mass immigration supporter, Nick Reece, believes that he has the solution to Melbourne’s rental crisis and declining economy: more migrants and international students!
Reece is actively canvassing for Chinese and Indian businesses to open their head offices in Melbourne, citing the city’s high Indian and Chinese diasporas, alongside calling for more international students.
“I’m going to be very aggressively pursuing Chinese and Indian companies to establish headquarters here,” he told The Australian Financial Review on Sunday.
“Greater Melbourne has the greatest Indian diaspora in the country and Melbourne has the biggest Chinese population – 30% of residents speak Mandarin in their homes,” he said…
“We want more international students in Melbourne not less,” Mr Reece said. “[Prime Minister Anthony] Albanese’s plan to cap international students is wrong-headed and [Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton’s plan is even worse. It’s an example of policy being made based on talkback radio in Sydney.
“Egon Zehnder could not design a better pipeline [than international students] for talent. They are the rivers of gold for our nation,” he said.
These types of statements from Reece are nothing new. In 2022, he called for a “massive wave of new immigrants to help get the city back on track”.
Reece’s recent statements calling for more immigration contradict his 2020 mea culpa, whereby he called on Australia to wean itself off its unhealthy reliance on immigration-fuelled growth:
“Our economy and wages are stagnating, our cities are struggling to manage population growth and congestion, millions of Australians live below the poverty line”…
“The Australian economy needs to get off its dependency on “holes” (mining) and “houses” (population growth fuelled by immigration) and focus on enhancing productivity and building a high wage value-added knowledge economy”…
Over the past 20 years, Melbourne’s population has ballooned by an insane 1.7 million people—growth that crush-loaded everything in sight and destroyed livability across Melbourne, as Nick Reece himself admitted in 2018:
They are some of Melbourne’s biggest design eyesores: buildings that shot up over the past decade, during the central city’s biggest ever construction boom…
“We have let too much crap be built,” Melbourne City Council’s planning chair Nick Reece says…
“We are seeing low-quality design outcomes”…
Victorian’s material living standards have also collapsed, with the state’s productivity growing at a far slower rate than the national average:
Victoria’s real per capita household disposable income has also plummeted from being just above the national average at the turn of the century to 10% below the national average:
Doubling down on the failed mass immigration economic model will achieve the same results all over again: the proliferation of ugly high-rise apartments, infrastructure bottlenecks, congestion, sluggish productivity growth, and delining material living standards.
Sadly, Lord Mayor Nick Reece doesn’t represent the interests of Melburnians, only the elites in the business, property, and education lobbies.
Politicians like Nick Reece are part of the problem.
