“The big leap”, The Age, 10/11. Residents of a seaside town, Torquay, are experiencing the unpleasant aspects of population growth.
Monash University demographer Bob Birrell says the entire world is ageing and the massive numbers of migrants needed to increase the ratio of workers to pensioners could be more of a catastrophe than the problem it seeks to overcome. “It is not sensible policy to commit ourselves to building a new Canberra every year for the next 40 years,” he says, citing Canberra’s population of about 390,000, which is less than the 439,000 population growth this year. “To go to 35 million, it’s dumb growth. It diverts our scarce capital…to building more shopping malls and extending suburbia rather than increasing the productivity of our existing workforce so we can make more and export more.”
Former NSW premier Bob Carr says Australia is choosing to “play Russian roulette with water security” by encouraging such high population growth. He is incredulous that almost every development today is subject to an environmental impact statement except for “the most fundamental of all, a decision to ramp up immigration”. Carr, who launched Mark O’Connor and William Lines’ book Overloading Australia earlier this year, says people mistakenly think Australia is like North America, which has “serious rivers” and a fertile inland. “We are like North Africa – a fertile coastal strip and, a short distance inland, an arid zone where the soil blows away and the rains fall erratically. But people project the North American experience on to Australia and there are powerful business interests behind high immigration. The housing sector loves it. I don’t think the Australian people want it.”
Letters, 11/11:
Winners grin, but losers left to cope
Torquay residents’ concerns about water, amenity and environmental impact in the face of exponential population growth are entirely reasonable. (“The Big Leap”, Focus, 10/11). As residents see all these factors deteriorate, they may well wonder what benefits they are getting from huge changes to their town.
A footpath here or there, or a conveniently located supermarket, would not quite compensate for the lost tranquillity of a town that has tripled in population in three years.
To see who benefits from population growth, look at who advocates it. To see who pays and loses, look at who is forced to accommodate it and live with its consequences.
– Jill Quirk, president, Sustainable Population Australia, Victoria, Frankston
The disappearing people
I suppose now that Torquay has blocked a proposed housing development, those who would have lived there will just vanish. A population of 35 million people will demand housing, not the other way around.
– Edward Sainsbery, Eaglemont
From sleepy to dusty
Tina Lee of Torquay feels anxious about her part of heaven being transformed from a small hamlet into a big city-like coastal suburb. It’s also like that in the suburbs of Melbourne. Port Melbourne, where I was born some 73 years ago, was a sleepy hollow 10 years ago, with a population of about 7000. Now, on every corner, we have apartments, some on the beach as high as 16 storeys, and a population of about 16,000 – and climbing.
We also suffer from dust due to demolition, filthy streets, blocked drains, traffic disruption and no footpaths at all during building. We are in the midst of Melbourne’s new main sewer being installed, which will possibly take two years – more dust, more noise, more upheaval.
It is all happening due to the growth of Melbourne, for better or worse.
– Lois Daley, Port Melbourne
Following a path to ruin
Mary-Anne Toy has done a great service to the residents of this part of the world. However, she failed to note that we in the Surf Coast Shire pay virtually the highest rates in the state, with annual increases several times the rate of inflation.
The council is now hell-bent on erecting a $25 million-plus new chambers, together with sundry sports fields. This antipodean Taj Mahal is the wrong building at the wrong time in the wrong place, sited a few hundred metres from the shire’s northern extremity – making it much closer to Geelong than Anglesea, let alone Lorne.
Mayor Libby Mears maintains she cannot afford to pay for all the infrastructure to cope with the population boom, yet trumpets the wonderful (and unnecessary) splurge on the new chambers and associated facilities. She and her co-councillors seem to have forgotten that less than a dozen years ago the then council “lost” many millions of dollars.
An exhaustive inquiry seemed to come to the conclusion that no one was to blame. Many of us are waiting, fearful for a repeat of that disaster.
– Michael Muschamp, Torquay
“That’s it for sprawl: Madden”, 11/11. The incompetent oaf of a Planning Minister promises the urban growth boundary will not be moved again in his lifetime.
Planning and environment academic Michael Buxton, of RMIT University, said he had heard similar promises before. “This is the third time they have made this promise, originally it was made by [former premier] Steve Bracks,” Associate Professor Buxton said. “And it was made when the Government expanded the boundary in November 2005 and they just keep rolling out the same promises and the same inadequate solutions. “The promises are designed to try and fool people into accepting their inadequate solutions.”
“Growing population calls for big-picture focus”, 11/11. A rather unfocused editorial, saying that growth should be planned for, and that Australia can’t close its borders to the rest of the world. But if we don’t want our cities to evolve into the hellish megacities in the countries mentioned, we will have to put up restrictions.
“Shut the door on Kiwis to curb growth says MP”, Herald-Sun, 12/11. MP Kelvin Thomson, seemingly the only politician concerned with, and outspoken about, population growth, says that immigration from New Zealand should be cut, as well as immigration generally. (I thought NZ had a good quality of life – are things so bad there that people want to leave?)
Mr Thomson called for annual net immigration to be slashed from more than 200,000 now to just 70,000. This would stabilise the population at 26 million by 2050, instead of the 35 million predicted by the Government. Under the Thomson plan:
- Skilled migrant numbers would be cut from 114,000 to 25,000 a year and refugees would rise by 6000 to 20,000.
- The baby bonus would be abolished and family payments cut to lower the fertility rate.
