NSW Premier Chris Minns published a propaganda article in the Daily Telegraph calling on residents to get behind the government’s plan to plaster Sydney with high-rise apartment towers:
Sydney isn’t a museum. A city like Sydney – a great city – should have the confidence to grow and change with the times.
Most importantly, we need to build enough homes for our kids and our grandkids – so they could start their own families here.
There’s no doubt that change like this can be intimidating… As we deal with the housing crisis, it’s possible to build with purpose and speed, while still encouraging beauty and style in our planning system.
Minns gaslighting follows last decade’s high-rise apartment boom, which plastered Sydney with poor-quality, defective shoe boxes.
According to a November 2023 NSW government strata study, more than half of newly registered structures since 2016 had at least one severe problem, with repair costs averaging $331,829 per building.
Waterproofing and fire safety were the two most prevalent major faults, according to the Strata Community Association NSW.
These flaws were highlighted in the Four Corners Report “Cracking Up”, which revealed a systemic failure to control and safeguard the purchasing public from poor workmanship.
Construction lawyer Bronwyn Weir warned that building apartments “with purpose and speed”, as suggested by Minns above, would inevitably result in corners being cut and widespread defects.
“On current estimates, 50% of what will be built will have serious defects”, Weir told The AFR in January.
We got a taste of Minns’ dystopian vision for Sydney with the “bold vision” to cram 30,000 residents into Sydney Olympic Park.
The marketing brochures paint a utopian picture of high-rise towers enveloped with greenery:
The reality will be drab grey towers and wind tunnels, just like every other high-rise precinct. The area will inevitably also suffer from a lack of infrastructure and services for the 30,000 expansion in population.
In fact, residents of nearby Wentworth Point—home to about 15,000 people in high-rise apartments— raised concerns about the “bold vision”.
Many Wentworth Point residents reportedly feel like “second-class citizens” due to the absence of a public park and the delayed light rail service, despite the area’s density.
All of Sydney’s future population growth is projected to come via ongoing high net overseas migration, which will increase the city’s population by around 3 million people over 50 years.
The cheapest, easiest, and fastest solution to Sydney’s housing crisis is to stabilise Australia’s population by slashing net overseas migration.
Nobody voted to live in expensive, poor quality, high-rise shoe boxes.
