The lies being perpetuated to defend Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy continue to snowball.
Following Treasurer Scott Morrison’s bald-faced lies about Australia’s immigration program last week, Eamon Waterford – the director of policy at the Committee for Sydney – spread a whopping porky pie in Fairfax yesterday:
Sydneysiders are anxious about crowding and congestion – and they expect politicians to fix it… While this new enthusiasm for limiting growth is understandable, it’s misguided.
Sydney is growing at 2 per cent a year – higher than Australia’s overall rate of 1.6 per cent. We have crowded trains, unaffordable housing and many parts of the community are expressing a general discomfort with the rate of change and development happening around them. On the face of it, slowing growth through reducing immigration looks like a sensible solution…
Here’s the problem: it won’t work. Reducing immigration will have an impact on the population of Australia, but it’s highly unlikely to take pressure off Sydney or Melbourne.
To understand why, it’s worth reflecting that the population of our cities sits in a careful equilibrium. On the one hand, economic opportunity and social vibrancy entice people to move to our big cities. On the other, as life gets too expensive, or too congested, some people choose to leave. We see this in Sydney – while 85,000 people immigrated to Sydney from overseas last year, 18,100 chose to leave for another place in Australia. It has ever been thus – Sydney is the world’s gateway to Australia.
Therefore, reducing our immigration rate would reduce the number of people moving to Sydney from overseas, which would hopefully reduce the congestion and cost of living in our city. Unfortunately, fewer new arrivals would almost certainly mean locals who would otherwise choose to leave will end up staying put – leaving the city in the same position as before.
Eamon Waterford’s lies are easily debunked. According to the NSW Government’s own projections, Sydney’s population would grow by only 460,000 in the 20-years to 2036 under both zero net overseas migration and zero net interstate migration, versus growth of 1.74 million under current mass immigration settings:
That’s a difference of nearly 1.3 million extra people projected to flood Sydney caused purely by immigration, even assuming no Sydneysider leaves.
Put another way, if there was no net migration out of Sydney, net overseas migration would still account for nearly three quarters of Sydney’s population growth.
Of course, we should not be surprised by this result, given the Productivity Commission has also projected that almost all of Australia’s future population growth will come from immigration, with Australia’s population increasing by only 2 million people (to 27 million people) under zero net overseas migration, versus growth of 16 million people under current immigration settings (200,000 people a year):
So stop lying, Eamon. Immigration is the fundamental cause of Sydney’s population pressures. The NSW Government’s own projections for Sydney prove this to be the case.
Everyone involved in the ponzi is being engulfed in chaos, via Domianfax today:
The NSW Planning Minister, Anthony Roberts, will consider suspending a new code that makes it easier to build medium-density housing for any council that wants to change its planning rules.
The offer follows almost three years of promoting the concept of more “missing middle” terrace-style housing, and comes a month after the promised introduction of the code, exposing the government to claims of another backflip.
Mr Roberts this week suspended the so-called medium-density housing code in the City of Ryde and the City of Canterbury Bankstown – after both councils argued it would allow densification in areas ill-suited to more housing.
Sydney doesn’t want to eat Queen Lucy Turnbull’s apartments. Who can blame it given tumbling living standards?
Cut immigration.
