Mass immigration reboot will destroy Melbourne

The lack of planning and foresight to cope with the immigration deluge into Australia’s big cities never ceases to amaze.

In the 15 years to 2019, Melbourne’s population ballooned by an insane 1.4 million people, representing a 39% increase:

The predictable result was the crush-loading of all manner of economic and social infrastructure, from roads to public transport, to schools and hospitals.

The COVID pandemic halted Melbourne’s rise, with the city actually losing population last financial year amid negative immigration:

However, with the planned ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration reboot, which is projected to swell Australia’s population 13.1 million people (a 50% increase) over the next 40 years on the back of extreme immigration levels of 235,000 people a year (charts from the Intergenerational Report):

Melbourne’s population will again bulge, given it is forecast to receive the highest share of immigration over this period, turning it into a mega city of around 10 million people.

The impacts of this extreme population growth will manifest in many forms, few of which are positive.

Just last week, Melburnians were told to prepare for chronic water shortages as the city’s population doubles.

The Australian Medical Association’s this month also lamented decades of “magnificent underfunding” of Melbourne’s hospitals amid rampant population growth.

Now residents in Melbourne’s west are being told to prepare for a severe shortage of schools:

Wyndham City [is] one of Melbourne’s most heavily populated urban growth corridors.

The region has by far the highest number of enrolled students per government school of any municipality in Victoria, with an average of 983 students at its 37 government schools.

The average number of students per school across greater Melbourne is 554.

Analysis by Wyndham City found school enrolments leapt ahead of forecasts because planners failed to foresee an increase in housing density.

In budgeting for new schools, state government planners assumed Wyndham would maintain a housing density level of 12 to 15 dwellings per hectare, but recent developments have added 18 to 20 homes per hectare, a council report found.

The report predicts Wyndham will be six schools short of what the municipality needs by 2031, with a need for three extra primary schools, two secondary schools and a special school…

“Our classrooms are already overcrowded and bursting at the seams,” Cr Maynard said…

Wyndham has been left behind, with an influx of new residents but not enough infrastructure or schools to support them…

According to Peter Goss, School Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute, Victoria requires 220 new schools in the decade to 2026 merely to keep pace with projected student enrolments:

Good luck with that.

When I worked at the Victorian Treasury in 2006, the Government had recently released “Melbourne 2030”, which projected that Melbourne’s population would reach 5 million people by 2030. In 2010, the Government released “Melbourne Beyond 5 million”, which projected that Melbourne would add one million people in 15 years and warned that the city was not ready for this growth.

As we know, Melbourne smashed those projections, hitting 5 million people in 2018, 12 years earlier than projected in Melbourne 2030, with the city’s population swelling to 5.1 million as at 2019.

The crush-loading was projected to get worse by Infrastructure Australia recent modelling. This modelling predicted that traffic congestion, commute times, and access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space would all materially worsen as Melbourne’s population surges to a projected 7.3 million people by 2046 (let alone 10 million by 2060):

The biggest positive to arise from COVID-19 was that it stifled immigration and population growth, in turn giving governments an opportunity to catch-up on infrastructure.

Sadly, with immigration projected to reboot above pre-COVID levels, the crush-loading of infrastructure and services witnessed over the prior 15 years is set to continue and worsen across Melbourne. And for what?