Steve Price: Immigration is the policy area Peter Dutton should look at next

Flooding the country with migrants and foreign students is a lazy way to falsely boost economic activity and no one in Canberra dares speak about it, but the social fabric of the Australia we grew up in is under immense stress.

Peter Dutton is hanging his chance of winning the next election on Australians accepting the idea of nuclear energy and trusting him to bring down the crippling cost of living.

Immigration is the policy area he should be looking at next.

Melbourne’s population has hit five million people. In fact, it’s three packed MCG’s more than that.

Melbourne, according to best estimates, is now home to 5,316,000 people — a figure that is hard to get your head around and it’s not a baby boom creating the population explosion, its permanent and temporary immigration. I suspect the figure is higher than that.

We are now the biggest city in Australia by population passing Sydney, and on our way to a population of 8.5 million by 2050. By comparison in 1950 Melbourne’s population was 1.3 million and a bit. When I first lived here permanently it was under three million people and felt big.

Melbourne’s population has hit five million people. Picture: Ian Currie

Even as recently as 2017 – just seven years ago – it was 4.8 million meaning we have jammed more than another half a million people into a city that now is home to 75 per cent of Victorians.

Dutton knows we are in the middle of the worst housing crisis in Australian history with one estimate this week suggesting a new home would need to be built every two minutes to accommodate population growth and the arrival of migrants.

Flooding the country with migrants and foreign students is a lazy way to falsely boost economic activity and no one in Canberra dares speak about it, but I am sure the social fabric of the Australia we grew up in is under immense stress.

Gang related youth crime is out of control but no one in politics, policing or parts of the media are game to speak about it. Dancing around that issue will not fix it.

Social cohesion in bolted-on suburbs on the fringes of major cities like Melbourne seems to be of no concern to anyone making policy in this country. To raise this as an issue has you painted as some sort of unhinged racist right-wing nut job when the truth stares us all in the face.

Youth crime is out of control in Victoria.

Some migrants to this country struggle to fit in to what, when you think about it, is so foreign to where they have come from it could just as well be another planet.

For no reason other than curiosity I decided this week to spend some time in a couple of heavily migrant populated suburbs west of Melbourne. I am not suggesting these places are unique or particularly crime ridden but I keep reading reports of arrests of youngsters from Tarneit and Truganina.

Mid-morning on a Tuesday they just strike me as soulless barren places stuck in the middle of nowhere and I am sure there are countless other metropolitan housing estates as bad – if not worse – right around Australia. In fact, I could just as easily have travelled up the Hume Highway as Melbourne spreads north and found the same thing – unimaginative, jammed-in housing estates minus any soul.

Tarneit – postcode 3029 – according to the last census was home to 56,370 people and tipped to hit 63,000 people by 2031. Research shows it has a crime rate higher than most established suburbs and higher than its neighbours Point Cook, Williams Landing, Werribee and Hoppers Crossing – the latter two being older more established western Melbourne suburbs.

Tarneit is, as I described it, a bolted-on suburb created out of farming land to house the bulging migrant intake Melbourne is trying to accommodate. Truganina fits the same purpose and sits a couple of kilometres closer to Melbourne than Tarneit, which is 25km west of the CBD.

Tarneit Central shopping centre. Picture: Nicole Garmston

Unlike Werribee and Hoppers Crossing the newer housing estates are virtually devoid of trees and feature cookie cutter style homes lined up on a grid of planned streets with little character. Shopping seems confined to a couple of malls like Tarneit Central across a busy four lane access road from the Tarneit train station.

These places are so far removed from the inner suburbs of Melbourne as to be unrecognisable.

As the housing crisis deepens even Tarneit house prices have crept close to a million dollars with a four-bedroom, two-bathroom and two-car space modern house on Haystack Drive up for auction and tipped to fetch $880,000. Not far away in Noel Way an older Tarneit home with the same accommodation recently sold for $650,000.

These are expensive homes for where they are, designed to house families forced further and further out from established suburbs in older Melbourne. We are by the sheer weight of numbers creating two Melbourne’s, with one living in well-serviced traditional suburbs with a range of public transport and shopping strips.

Housing stress should give Peter Dutton the courage to act even further on immigration.

The other is forced to live west, north and south-east of the city in cheaply-built houses carved out of farmland with no history or community spirit and we wonder why they produce a disproportionate number of young criminals willing to use social media to brag about their crimes on those traditional parts of the city they feel cut off from.

I felt completely safe and at ease in Tarneit on Tuesday, but I don’t have to live there in the middle of a Melbourne summer and the thought of feeling lucky enough to be able to spend nearly a million dollars on a house to live there does my head in.

Peter Dutton seems to understand more than the Prime Minister the stresses on our major cities caused by mass migration.

Housing stress and the worst crisis in that sector in our history should give Dutton the courage to go even further than he did in his Budget in reply speech, where he vowed to cut permanent migrant numbers to an annual 140,000 down from Labor’s aim of 180,000.

Reality is Labor has let migration numbers soar out of control. In the last two financial years ending last week net migration reached a staggering figure of 923,000 people not far shy of a million.

This week the housing industries chief economist Tim Reardon made the point 120,000 homes would need to be built to house natural population growth alone with no migration at all. We added a million!

Perhaps the PM and the Opposition Leader could take a train out to Tarneit to see what migrant life in Australia is really like and think about pushing the pause button.

At least until we catch up.

Likes

– Noises about a police crackdown on youth crime let’s pray and hope they follow through.

– Noisy sheep farmers heading to Canberra to protect the live sheep trade cancelled by the Albanese government.

– Aussie sports stars dominating the world stage Oscar Piastri second in the Austrian Grand Prix and Cameron Davis win on the PGA tour with Min Woo Lee second.

– Aussie retail legend Dick Smith putting his name to the sensible adding of nuclear power to the energy mix.

Dislikes

– Lord Mayor Sally Capp replaced short-term by her deputy Nicholas Reece – same- same it seems.

– Victorian senior public servants’ snouts firmly in the trough with a 4.5 per cent pay rise – disgraceful.

– Melbourne’s tram network’s new operating contract handed to Chinese owned John Holland’s China Communications Construction Company.

– Federal Governments scaled back role in the US military exercise Rim of the Pacific cutting our contingent by 80 per cent.

Originally published as Steve Price: Immigration is the policy area Peter Dutton should look at next