Over the weekend, The Age complained that “too many of Victoria’s apartments are Dickensian: small, dark, poorly insulated and badly built”, yet “we’re going to ask millions more people to live in them” as the population swells through mass immigration.
“Between 2009 and 2020, Melbourne saw an explosion in the number of apartments being built, mainly in the inner city and inner-ring suburbs”, the report notes.
“In 2016 alone, 19,400 were completed, excluding student accommodation. Many were built cheaply by developers to sell to investors”.
The reason why so many high-rise shoe boxes were built is obvious: Melbourne’s population has ballooned by nearly 50% since the turn of the century.
“Victoria’s projected population in 2056 will be 11.2 million and Melbourne itself will grow by about 4 million people”, notes the report.
Therefore, shoe box living will become more commonplace in the future.
Looking north to NSW, former planning minister Rob Stokes has called for an end to Sydney’s high-rise apartments.
“Hard density is being imposed on Sydney not through public consensus, but rather because it is structurally and politically easier to do”, Stokes says.
“The logic is clear – better to have acute localised opposition to very high density in a few places, than a broad groundswell of political opposition to urban change everywhere”.
Stokes also questions whether high density housing is better for the environment, claiming high-rise apartment complexes create overshadowing, exacerbate the heat island effect and face “many technical and legal constraints on the use of renewable energy”.
These sorts of outcomes will persist so long as the federal government maintains its damaging ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration agenda.
Bringing hundreds of thousands of migrants into our major cities each year will inevitably result in the proliferation of more high-rise towers, the consumption of more open space, and increased traffic congestion.
For what purpose? So that billionaire real estate moguls like Highrise Harry Triguboff and toll road operator Transurban can get even richer by gorging on the never-ending influx of warm bodies?
Let’s get back to basics. The federal government could permanently address our cities’ housing and infrastructure shortages with the stroke of a pen.
All that is required is a reduction in net overseas migration to pre-2005 levels. This would also eliminate the need to bulldoze our suburbs into density.
Any housing and infrastructure shortage is a direct result of excessive immigration.
Sadly, the property lobby, nor our captured politicians, economists, and media, will never admit it.
