Crispin Hull: Portico
Monday October 14 2013
"Melborn and Sideny" by 2040
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 Melbournians 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”.
Where this leaves the rest of Australia is a big question.
“Melbourne’s status as Australia’s largest jobs hub could be achieved even earlier as major new urban renewal precincts come online,” Guy 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”.
Do Melbournians with their stronger beer and Melbourne Cup really want to add an extra line to the ditty: “We’ve got a larger jobs hub.”
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.
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 Farmers 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. It is a big lose for those outside those big cities. The problem is that the growing population of Sydney and Melbourne are sucking too much of the nation’s infrastructure effort.
A two per cent increase in the population does not sound much, but look at it this way: The average piece of infrastructure lasts about 50 years: a road, bridge, school, hospital and so on. So to keep replacing the depreciating part of the existing infrastructure you need to spend about two per cent of its value each each – two per cent a year for 50 years is 100 per cent.
Now, that is with no population increase. With a two per cent increase in population, however, you need another two per cent of infrastructure. So a two per cent rise in population means you have to double your infrastructure effort.
Now you understand why councils and state governments find it impossible to keep up with federally mandated immigration levels. We have to build the equivalent of two and a half Cairnses every year. That is a lot of infrastructure. The cities, where the state governments are based, get first priority. Places like Port Douglas are way down in the queue.
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.
