IN 1968 an obscure pop-folk group called The Idlers Five produced a silly, mediocre hit called “Melborn and Sideny”. 
Included in the brash, jingoistic ditty were lines so excruciatingly bad that they became seared in my memory: “We’ve got Australian Rules and the Melbourne Cup each year. Sydney’s girls are way out front but we’ve got stronger beer.”
In the same vein, the Victorian Government released this week a “planning and transport blueprint” that will “shape how Melburnians will work and live over the next 40 years”, in the words of Planning Minister Matthew Guy.
He “revealed new forecasts that confirmed the City of Melbourne is likely to eclipse the City of Sydney as a jobs hub before 2040”.
“Melbourne status as Australia’s largest jobs hub could be achieved even earlier as major new urban renewal precincts come online,” he said in a media statement that palpitated breathlessness.
But do the people of Melbourne want this jobs-hub “status”.
Guy mentioned six regional towns as “designated as new major population and employment towns for growth” as Victoria’s population is “projected to rise to 8.4 million by 2050”.
These politicians do not understand. The people of Melbourne do not want “urban renewal precincts”, which is a euphemism for developers banging up high-density, high-rise units, trashing the neighbourhood where there were once houses and never putting in enough schools, hospitals, parks and the like. Hospital waiting times, public transport and schools are already stretched to the limit.
Only land speculators and big-business franchisors are likely to benefit.
Do Melburnians with their stronger beer and Melbourne Cup really want to add an extra line to the ditty: “We’ve got a larger jobs hub.”
Only an impersonal planning bureaucracy could come up with the phrase “jobs hub” – drones pushing a capstan around the hub, all with “jobs”.
Politicians from both sides have been proudly “creating jobs” for decades now. In fact they have created nothing. The workforce that comes with the 400,000 so extra people added to Australia’s population each year desperately scramble around to get whatever employment they can, often despite government, not because of it.
Guy’s media statement gushed of the “largest jobs hub”: “We are on track to achieve this outcome by 2040 or earlier with nearly 90,000 jobs added in the City of Melbourne between 2006 and 2011 compared to the 30,000 in the City of Sydney.”
Note the use of capitalisation: City of Melbourne. City of Sydney. These central municipalities are a fraction of the total metropolitan area and population. Melbourne’s is 100,600 people out of 4.1 million. Sydney’s is 180,000 out of 4.4 million.
Central Sydney began its higher-density residential spurt earlier than Melbourne and its jobs growth in the city centre has therefore tapered. So Guy’s comparison is a statistical sleight of hand.
But that aside, why the pride in being ever bigger? Why the use of the word “jobs” rather than people, as if those without a “job” don’t count? And why the obsession with numbers of jobs, rather than their quality? What kind of jobs are they: merely attempting to cater for the extra population or the sort of jobs that add to the quality of life of the existing population?
Premier Denis Napthine said his Government was planning for Melbourne to grow by 2.4 million by 2050, making it a city of 6.5 million.
When will this insanity stop? How can this make what is now called “the world’s most livable city” any better?
The tensions are obvious. The planning documents make the usual incompatible promises: protection of existing residential amenity and streamlined development processes free of politicisation.
Added to this tension is the voice of Australian agriculture. The Victorian Famers Federation called for geographic boundary to metropolitan Melbourne.
The 2.5 million people will need 1,046,000 more homes. These can only be built on agricultural land or by greater density in the existing city limits, or both.
It is a lose-lose for everyone but developers, real-estate agents, financiers, road builders, car dealers and the chains of franchise retail and fast-food outlets that populate the malls in new suburbs.
But back to our “Melborn and Sideny” comparison, it would be no idle comment to say that the city whose government eschews population grow will win the livability stakes. Both cities are well beyond the population threshold needed to provide all the best things in life – if you can afford them. The extra population only makes things worse.
Interestingly, awareness of the problem politically seems marginally higher in Sydney.
The NSW Opposition Leader John Robertson at least acknowledges that the provision of infrastructure for the extra people is a hard ask.
“The central policy challenge for NSW is maintaining our quality of life in the face of a rapidly rising population,” he told the Telegraph. “Expanding our city at the current rate – while slashing services and failing to deliver infrastructure – is a recipe for disaster. . . .
“Everyone knows Sydney is already bursting at the seams. Hospital waiting rooms are full. School class sizes are on the up. Our suburbs are inching further out. Yet all of this is before our State braces to absorb another 2 million people between now and 2031 – the official population projection that Premier Barry O’Farrell recently endorsed for NSW.”
Robertson is almost there. At least he understands the problem even if he is not willing to endorse the obvious solution – not by attempting the impossible task of providing the infrastructure for the increasing population, but rather by not having the increased population in the first place.
The week before, there was a classic illustration of how increased population can affect living standards in a way that does not sound in money or the economy.
Education Minister Adrian Piccoli response to inner-city schools filling up and shrinking their boundaries was that siblings could no longer expect to go to the same primary school.
Has he any idea of the struggle young parents have delivering children to one primary school, let alone two different ones?
But that’s what happens when infrastructure is stretched by rising population.
Australian Rules, the Melbourne Cup, the beer and the girls aside, both these cities face declining quality of life unless their political leaders wake up to the obvious.
Oh, and incidentally, Melbourne had its hottest September on record this year and Sydney was expecting its hottest October maximum daily temperature on record at time of writing on Thursday.
Nothing out of the ordinary pattern, the sceptics will say, but it’s salient that among all these records being set we are not seeing any for lowest or coldest.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 12 October 2013.
Great article. People don’t want population growth, despite what many politicians think. I fear it’s going to get a whole lot worse before politicians take the step of slashing immigration rates. That is unless voters turn to the #Sustainable Population Party in droves. We can only hope.
Crispin is absolutely correct. Population growth is strangling cities in Australia and reducing the quality of life for most inhabitants. OZ cities have long since reached critical mass, at which the delivery of a broad range of public services to all can be financed. Now the overpopulation is making life miserable as parks are consumed, roads become tolled and living costs skyrocket.
Its time to focus on better and not bigger with a sustainable population.