A tale of two Victorias: Melton and Bacchus Marsh experience massive population boom but other regions miss out

With the population booming in Melbourne’s outer west, a local mayor is worried “essential infrastructure such as roads, healthcare and education” won’t keep up.

The outer suburbs of Melbourne have seen massive population growth over the last ten years, with places like Melton seeing a 55.3 per cent increase and Bacchus Marsh a 43.2 per cent rise.

But it’s not a rosy picture everywhere with some towns in regional Victoria going backwards in size, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher said the major driving force behind the population boom in outer Melbourne was housing prices.

“It’s about housing affordability. People moving to Melton and similarly Bacchus Marsh are in their 30s now and looking to buy a family house,” he said.

“Now the hipster flat in Brunswick isn’t doing it anymore … they are looking for a four-bedroom.”

Mr Kuestenmacher said the Millennial generation was facing a struggle to find family housing in inner city suburbs.

“It always happened, people lived near the unis and then moved into suburbia, that is not possible for Millennials because these middle suburbs are being hogged by essentially their parents,” he said.

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“The Millennials have had to skip the middle suburbs and they did to go to outer suburbs. This trend will continue for another decade.”

With the Millennials and Baby Boomers taking all the space in the inner and outer city, things will get very interesting for Generation Z, Mr Kuestenmacher said, as they will see a sort of “double swap”.

“The 2030s will be by far one of the most interesting periods the housing market has seen simply because you’ll have Gen Z wanting to buy family homes,” he said.

“By then though the Baby Boomers that are hogging the homes in middle suburbs — they are going to be of downsizing age, meaning dying.

Inner city Melbourne has seen stagnation over the last ten years because Generation Z can't afford to move in. Picture: Brett Hartwig.

“Will [Generation Z] be able to afford the Baby Boomer homes? Probably not, but that might be a good opportunity for Millennials to move back closer to the city and Gen Z will move to the outer suburbs. Like a double swap.”

Melton mayor Lara Carli said the massive population boom in the region had made it hard for the town to keep up.

“The City of Melton is one of Melbourne’s fastest growing areas with our population is expected to more than double by 2050,” she said.

“This brings significant challenges not only for council, but also for state and federal government, to ensure that the of delivery essential infrastructure such as roads, health care and education facilities as well as investment to create local jobs keeps pace with this growth.”

However, massive population growth has not been uniform across Victoria with the northwestern electorate of Lowan declining by 2 per cent and while Newborough in Morwell rose by 1.6 per cent.

Out in rural Victoria many towns have seen population decline over the last ten years as family farms aggregated into bigger and bigger properties.

Mr Kuestenmacher put this down to the younger generations having less interest in taking over their parents’ farming properties.

“Towards the west there a plenty of local government areas that saw population decline. They saw decline because this in an ageing population,” he said.

“The young people that are there leave for the bigger cities and the kids of the farmer don’t take the farm over which leads to farm aggregation and larger farms, with fewer workers, so there no demand for jobs those regions and they shrink.”

These places needed to adapt and find new sources of income to bring people out there, Mr Kuestenmacher said.

“You need proactively create employment,” he said.

“Traditional agriculture jobs are slowly shrinking away, so what you can do is double down on tourism, you double down on manufacturing.

“You see what Horsham and surrounds and the Grampians are doing with the silo art, trying to attract growth and make it a more liveable area but it’s a very difficult and uphill battle.”