Last week, Victoria’s bureaucrat responsible for implementing the government’s housing agenda, Jeroen Weimar, warned that Melbourne’s population is projected to balloon to more than 8 million people in only 25 years, meaning that Melbourne would “look fundamentally different in 25 years’ time”.
“Melbourne will be the size of London from a population point of view – a city of over 8 million people”, Weimar said. “The state will have over 10 million people in it, and as such we can’t think about housing incrementally”.
“If we are going to accommodate the growth that we want to see…, then we need to create more housing capacity in our system”, he said.
Very few people that I speak to in Melbourne want the city to continue growing. They have seen the city’s population balloon by 50% since the turn of the century, and they cannot imagine what it will be like in 2056 if Melbourne expands to 9.0 million as projected by the state government:
It took Melbourne around 170 years to reach a population of 3.5 million in 2001. Therefore, growing by another 5.5 million people in only 55 years is sheer lunacy and will ensure Melbourne’s living standards collapse.
A 9News report on Friday highlighted how Melbourne’s infrastructure is already lagging way behind population growth, resulting in “horrendous” traffic congestion.
“Traffic is getting horrendous”, said a housing developer living in Melbourne’s rapidly growing west, meaning that “residents are suffering a lot.”.
Simon Kuestenmacher from The Demograhics Group warned that it is “very unlikely” that Melbourne’s growth areas “would get the infrastructure that they need”.
Kuestenmacher also said that Melbourne has a structural “infrastructure backlog of around 20 years”.
Melbourne’s population is currently more than 5.3 million people. It is officially projected to add another 3.7 million people in only 32 years, or 115,625 people a year.
Hobart currently has around 260,000 people. Therefore, Melbourne is officially projected to add 14 Hobart’s worth of people in 32 years.
Who honestly believes that this level of population growth can be accommodated with commensurate levels of housing, infrastructure, and services? Nobody.
Melbourne has categorically failed to keep pace with the recent population growth. And the situation will only worsen as the city continues to grow like an out-of-control lab experiment via mass immigration.
The only realistic way of safeguarding living standards in Melbourne (and Australia more generally) is to slash net overseas migration so that we don’t grow so aggressively.
Nobody voted for Melbourne to swell by 5.5 million people in only 55 years and to transform into an Asian-style high-rise city.
