Steve Price: Suburban housing towers in Brighton are a calculated plan from the Premier and will ruin Melbourne

Premier Jacinta Allan’s plan for suburban housing towers in Brighton, Toorak, Malvern, Armadale and Hawksburn is going to ruin Melbourne.

It takes a lot to fill a Brighton street with angry protesters on a Sunday afternoon in October.

Typically, residents of the suburb, the day after the running of the Caufield Cup, would be nursing early Spring Carnival hangovers.

Not since Brighton identities Jodie Grollo – better known as Karen from Brighton – and Rebecca Judd tore into Daniel Andrews over Covid restrictions and lack of policing around violent home invasions, have we seen such anger bayside.

And who can blame them as Premier Jacinta Allan decided it was a good idea to sneak in the back door of the Half Moon Hotel on Church St to announce she was fast-tracking the carpet bombing of suburban Melbourne with apartment blocks.

The pub actually locked the front doors to keep protesters out – proving Premier Allan knew trouble was brewing.

Brighton has been listed as one of the first locations for multi-storey housing towers. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

In a desperate bid to continue the Ponzi scheme she and PM Albanese have cooked up to stimulate the economy with unsustainable levels of immigration, the Premier has had to find somewhere to house these people.

After the disastrous plan to plonk many of the new migrants in converted sheep paddocks on Melbourne’s outer limits, now it’s the turn of Brighton, Toorak, Malvern, Armadale and Hawksburn.

And what do those five suburbs have in common aside from some of the richest real estate in Victoria?

They are Liberal-held seats unlikely to ever vote Labor.

It’s a no-risk plan for a Premier who is increasingly morphing into the sort of narcissistic dictator Dan Andrews became.

How else can you explain the provocative no consultation announcement made in that pub last Sunday.

The Bendigo-based professional Labor politician would have known that turning up in Brighton unannounced to let owners of multimillion-dollar homes know that they would soon be sharing their little bit of paradise with five, ten maybe 20-storey high apartment towers was going to cause a lot of grief.

What sort of leader does that if not someone wanting to stick it up a crowd of wealthy people from Brighton.

Smacks of a Dan Andrews act, reminding me of the time when he told Melburnians not to take their masks off to sip cocktails through a straw, and while walking the Tan.

This though was much worse.

This was a socialist left premier sticking her middle finger up at a crowd of people who don’t want to see their suburb radically changed, using the fact that Brighton has a train station as an excuse.

The Premier announced a review into building and planning systems in a bid to fast track and simplify the subdivision process. Picture: Melbourne Press Club

Mystery surrounds this move from Labor, when if you bother to look at some of the suburbs where Allan will make it easier for developers to throw up these towers – if they even bother to bid for the work – they already have high density living.

The residential towers surrounding Caufield Racecourse are a great example of an economically successful development near transport.

The uglier side of the story is the development looming over the facade of the Angel Tavern on the corner of Glenferrie Rd and Dandenong Rd – too big, out of place and a stark example of what these so-called activity centres announced last weekend will really look like.

Talking to seasoned property developers and construction bosses this week, who doubt much of this activity will ever get off the ground, they point out a lack of tradies that is already smashing their industry.

Add to that the ongoing war with the CFMEU and expense of materials plus the crushing tax regime of a broke Victoria.

Other much more practical issues have turbo-charged talkback radio callers this week, including the issue of parking, traffic congestion caused by jamming thousands of new residents into already busy suburbs, let alone a lack of school places for these flat-dwelling children, pressure on health services and lack of green space.

Add to that the prospect of the planned 50 activity centres and the traffic chaos that would cause as these vertical big builds start construction.

Melbourne would become unliveable.

Brighton locals have protested the Premier’s announcement. Picture: NewsWire / Nadir Kinani

This immigration Ponzi scheme is causing major grief for our capital cities.

At the end of 2023 the Centre for Population calculated Melbourne’s current population would sit at around 5.21 million people, growing to 6.45 million in 10 years time.

Melbourne – if not already – has a bigger population than Sydney making us the biggest city in Australia. In fact, New York aside at 8 million people, Melbourne is bigger than any city in the US including Los Angeles at 3.8 million people.

Unless I missed it, no one asked anyone in our city if we wanted to be this big. Immigration will be a front and centre issues at the upcoming Federal election but sadly it’s too late with both sides of politics taking the lazy option of opening the migrant flood gates to try and falsely prop up the economy. But if you dare challenge it, you are labelled a racist.

Peter Dutton needs to firmly argue that the pause button will be pushed if he wins.

Further he needs to get serious about spreading Australia out and not simply jamming more people into Melbourne and Sydney.

A priority must be regional jobs for the larger regional towns of both Victoria and NSW.

It’s madness that places like Albury/Wodonga, Ballarat and Bendigo, Shepparton and in NSW Goulburn, Wagga-Wagga, Orange, Bathurst and other places are not booming.

Like Queensland with Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton and Cairns the two southern states need to spread out. Jacinta Allan ought to be spruiking her own hometown of Bendigo and sticking up some 20 storey apartment towers in her backyard.

She won’t, of course, because it’s easier to taunt the toffs in Toorak Village than upset the genteel folk of Bendigo.

Housing towers have long since been part of Melbourne suburbs. NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

And in a delicious twist, a pair of Federal Teals – in former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel and Kooyong’s Monique Ryan – are blowing up over the concentration of tower locations in their electorates.

Ironically, it’s those same Teals who would be happy for regional Australia to be carpet bombed with wind turbines and solar panels to realise their green dream.

What a pair of hypocrites. It’s OK to ruin the quality of life in bush towns but don’t you dare stick up blocks of flats in our neighbourhoods. What a joke that pair are!

The slew of housing announcements by Premier Allan this week are her Daniel Andrews moment.

He won election after election with his cleverly targeted level crossings program that saw ugly elevated train stations installed on the Frankston line and his promises of major road projects including the Westgate Tunnel. Of course, they were all over budget and way over time to be completed but people fell for his spin.

Allan who is unlikely to still be in office when any of these Brighton or Toorak towers are completed has condemned Melbourne to become an Australian version of somewhere like Shanghai.

I think she has completely underestimated how people in her city want to live and she will ultimately pay the price.

Likes

— King Charles and Queen Camilla’s three-day Aussie tour a raging success burying an idea of is becoming a Republic.

— Glasgow’s slimmed down 2026 Commonwealth Games funded by Victorian taxpayers – another Dan and Jacinta stuff up.

— Australian wine exports to China back on track after tariffs removed.

Dislikes

— Waste high un-cut grass along South Road and the Dingley bypass median strips posing a summer fire danger.

— Senator Lydia Thorpe’s foul-mouthed abuse of King Charles a global embarrassment for Australia.

— The dodgy quality of many candidates standing for local council elections.

Originally published as Steve Price: Suburban housing towers in Brighton are a calculated plan from the Premier and will ruin Melbourne