Walk out the front door of your rental accommodation — the one you’re stuck in because your apartment building has serious defects that have made it uninhabitable — get in your car and spend an hour stuck in congestion, or crammed up against other passengers on public transport, knowing that the same commute next year will be more congested and more crowded, not less.
That’s the future for the people of Sydney and Melbourne on present policy settings, and it’s the price we’ll have to pay for policymakers’ and business’ obsession with high immigration. We’re addicted to it, and, as Infrastructure Australia’s latest Infrastructure Audit demonstrates, ever-worsening congestion is the price we’ll pay.
The recurring theme of the 2019 Audit is the impact of a rapidly growing population on infrastructure, with an entire supplementary report on Urban Transport Crowding and Congestion identifying how much worse congestion will get in Sydney and Melbourne over the next decade, and what it will cost the economy.
“The future the report paints is one of growing congestion costs and public transport crowding, driven by a growing population,” it says. “In the last 10 years, Australia’s population has grown by 4 million, nearly twice as many new Australians than the previous decade.”
But “Australia’s urban population has also been growing twice as fast as other areas.” And that growth is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. The total cost to the Australian economy will be about $39 billion in 2031. But congestion isn’t a nebulous economic cost spread across all our economic activity — it has real social and human impacts in terms of quality of life, time spent with family and major decisions such as where to live.
It isn’t merely transport — the audit proper covers all varieties of infrastructure. On water, for example, it offers this warning :
While climate change is tightening water supplies in many parts of the country, our population has grown rapidly, with growth concentrated in urban areas. This trend is likely to continue, with the population of all capitals projected to grow faster than the balance of their respective state or territory. Impacts will be felt most in the south-eastern regions, where the joint factors of population growth and climate change are expected to be most pronounced.
While the government insists that it has reduced immigration — as minister Alan Tudge did overnight — in fact it has only tinkered at the margins, reducing the permanent migration level by a few thousand while presiding over a massive increase in temporary migration.
As a recent report by temporary migration spruikers CEDA shows, temporary migrant numbers have surged from already high levels over the last decade: working holidaymakers are up 35,000 a year since 2010, special category visas up over 100,000, bridging visas — primarily due to the government losing control of the onshore humanitarian visa program — more than doubled to over 170,000 and, most of all, foreign students, up to nearly half a million a year.
In 2005, there were around 800,000 temporary visa holders in Australia, apart from tourists; in 2018 there were 1.6 million. Even now, the government continues to boast about adding to the number of migrant workers.
The influx has meant that big infrastructure investment programs by the NSW Coalition government and the Victorian Labor government have barely kept pace with the needs of Sydney and Melbourne as those cities deal with rapid increases in population. Infrastructure Australia’s report effectively concludes state governments need to maintain the recent surge in investment just to keep pace with projected population increases — let alone catch up on the backlog.
The beneficiary of this extraordinary surge in temporary migrants under the federal Coalition has been the business sector, which has used it to push down wages and engage in an epidemic of wage theft that shows no signs of abating despite years of revelations about rip-offs of visa holders. Ordinary workers have in effect paid the price twice over, with stagnant wages and growing commuting times and more crowded infrastructure, while business has enjoyed stronger demand and lower costs.
And while the NSW government has worked hard to keep a stream of major infrastructure projects moving forward, it has done virtually nothing to fix the catastrophic mess of building certification in NSW that it inherited from Labor, despite being repeatedly and bluntly told that major problems were unfolding. Even now, it continues to drag the chain on re-regulating a sector that should never have been deregulated in the first place as population pressure drove the move to medium and high-density housing across Sydney.
At home, on the commute, at work — millions of people continue to pay the cost of our addiction to temporary migration and the failure of policymakers to deal with the infrastructure challenges it has created for us.
The joint is positively heaving from the amount of au-pairs and other domestic staff required to look after those at the top of the housing Ponzi scheme.
On the face of it, the solution is simple. Just reduce migration of all kinds to a much lower level, or even stop it altogether.
The trouble is, migration is a just a symptom. The real disease is expansionary capitalism, which is the economic organising principle of our society and which rests on an assumption of the possibility of unlimited growth.
Expansionary capitalism may have seemed workable when it was first adopted in Europe several centuries ago, when the world did indeed seem to the people of the time to be effectively infinite. Of course it’s not. We’ve known that for a very long time, but over recent decades it’s been increasingly violently rammed down our throats that it isn’t, through climate catastrophes and social upheaval and other events.
We desperately need two things. First, we need an alternative economic model that is capable of meeting the needs of all the planet, not just humans (a worthy challenge for economists, I’m sure). Second, we need to break the grip on power that the beneficiaries of expansionary capitalism have on the world’s politics and commerce.
If we can’t achieve these two things, then I think we are doomed.
FFS Bernard!
Give it up, “…the NSW government has worked hard to keep a stream of major infrastructure projects moving forward, it has done virtually nothing to fix the catastrophic mess of building certification in NSW that it inherited from Labor, …”
The Liberal/National government have been in office for almost 9 F**KING years.
The situation with the building industry is NOT the fault of the ALP! It is entirely and completely owned by Gladys Bin Chicken and her mates in the building industry.
The ALP were the ones who banned developers making political donations. The buildings are months old not a decade or more.
The complete clusterf**k that is the ‘stadium rebuild’ was opposed by the ALP at the last state election.
Seriously, seek help or stop writing about NSW state politics without printing a disclaimer at the beginning along the lines of, ‘Bernard Keane is incapable of ever holding the LNP to account at a state level in NSW and will always blame problems on the ALP. This blame is multi generational and unending.’
Marcolm…I don’t live in NSW, but understand what is going on over there with these less than habitable apartment buildings. But I wanted to say thank you for highlighting Bernard’s continuing ‘its all Labor’s fault’ rant, which is developing into fake news every time he writes anything about the NSW state government.
That is just NOT good enough…if we don’t apportion blame to those who should accept their wrong-doing, then what hope is there for any solution to this, and a slew of other, problems?
I just don’t understand why he persists in doing it.
His recent pieces on the federal election almost all managed to touch on Joe Tripodi & Ian MacDonald due to his spurious claim that Kristina Keneally was tainted by them.
She was the one who refused to have Tripodi in cabinet & MacDonald was already in jail when she was Premier, but that didn’t stop BK.
Couldn’t agree more.
Whatever else was witten in the article dissolved in this false and pointless bile.
Remedies require money. Recent massive tax giveaways damaged that idea, as intended.
Remind Centre Alliance Senators Stirling Griff and Rex Patrick and Senator Jackie Lambie, all day every day, that they sold themselves and us for small change when they passed the second $140 BILLION set of tax giveaways (very largely for the already rich) backed in the end by Labor. Added to the already legislated $154 BILLION in tax giveaways – also backed in the end by Labor – we now have at least $294 BILLION in cuts to services over those ten years. Thanks to them, by the end of this decade banking and other CEOs executives will be in the same tax bracket as trainee apprentices
IMHO that is not an incidental; the decision-makers are accustomed to impunity, so they look after themselves. To see our future if we let them get away with it, look to Hong Kong, Austerity Britain, Armed Brutalised America, or Duterte’s murderous Philippines.
Jackie lambie you would hope will forget about deals in the future with the lnp. Today Frydenberg is negotiating with tas state treasurer about jackie’s deal when surely it is a DONE deal already.
Got it in a nutshell RAR. So looking forward to this even more fair and just society. Impunity indeed.
Every power station could include a water cleaning or desalination plant, using the heat from its steam condenser. The paradigm allows for the expansion of population by providing potable water for as many people as consume its power.
Is there nothing your beloved nukes won’t cure?
Ingrown toenails? Male pattern baldness?
Cupidity?