By Clay Lucas
Melbourne is a city on steroids: the pace of growth it is experiencing is like nothing in our history.
It took Melbourne close to two centuries, from the town’s birth in 1835 until just after the Commonwealth Games in 2006, to tick over to a population of 4 million.
Melbourne just keeps on growing.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Melbourne should pass 5 million later this year.
A million extra people in little more than a decade.
And yet successive state governments have sat on their hands on public transport expansion and infrastructure investment in the outer suburbs, while watching the land taxes and developer contributions roll in from places such as Cranbourne East and Wyndham.
No wonder two state governments were voted out in that decade, in part over their failures to deliver decent services to voters in marginal electorates.
Daniel Andrews appears to have learnt the lesson from this – over the weekend, his government announced it would widen the Eastern Freeway from 10 lanes to an eye-watering 16 lanes, as part of its $16.5 billion North East Link.
Add to that its $6.8 billion West Gate Tunnel, to help motorists a little and Transurban a lot.
It’s also building a rail tunnel under central Melbourne for $11 billion.
But it could do so much more, on suburban arterial roads but particularly on public transport, where virtually everything but big signature projects such as the rail tunnel are put in the too-hard basket.
And that's just roads and rail. Demand for new schools, health services and other essential public utilities has long outstripped supply.
With growth figures booming as they are and treasury drowning in takings from property taxes, it’s easy for the state government to insist everything is rolling along well – that the world’s most liveable city is trundling along like nobody’s business.
It’s not. Population growth figures mask a sluggish economy that would struggle were the 80,000 international migrants who arrived last financial year subtracted from the equation.
As prominent economist Saul Eslake put it in an important Age investigation last year, Victoria’s economic growth is not based on the right ingredients.
"Economic growth driven only by population growth is not really worth having as it is not improving people's living conditions," he told The Age.
For seven years now, Melbourne has won the title of the world’s most liveable city – each year causing the city’s citizens to ask the obvious question: liveable for whom?
It’s certainly not for those like the residents of Cranbourne East, most of whom don’t have the money to buy within the 10-kilometre inner city ring where infrastructure is plentiful.
It was obvious almost a decade ago that the suburbs of Cranbourne East and Clyde in Melbourne’s south-east, then mostly just paddocks, needed a train station.
A $100,000 study quietly shelved in 2010 by the state government made clear it could be done and would probably be needed.
In the years since, Cranbourne East has gone from fewer than 10,000 residents to 34,000 today. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Statistics named it the suburb with the nation’s highest growth.
The rail line extension? It never happened, despite repeated pleas from Casey Council, now the state’s biggest municipality, and its hundreds of thousands of residents.
With a war chest primed for a state election, now is the time to spend what's needed – for all our citizens.