Jacinta Allan’s suburban towers will wreck our communities

From her home in Bendigo, 150 kilometres away, Jacinta Allan has announced that as Victoria’s population massively grows, she has a plan to sacrifice the liveability of our city and grow Melbourne into a mega-city. It’s pretty rich for a premier to be wrecking our city, when she doesn’t even live here.

As the premier keeps saying, Melbourne is set to grow to the size of London by the middle of the century. With Melbourne currently home to 5 million people and London 9 million, Allan will oversee the doubling of the size of our city.

James Newbury, the Liberal MP for Brighton.Credit: Scott McNaughton

That’s why the premier’s mega-Melbourne needs to be stuffed full of towers up to 20 storeys high in our suburbs. Of the announced activity centre growth, half of it is in three council areas – Bayside, Boroondara and Stonnington. This is instead of fixing the housing crisis properly through decentralisation and moderate growth fairly shared across the whole state.

Well, no, I don’t support the government’s plan, it’s bad policy and it’s bad for our future. I hate to break it to the bulldozing premier, but no one has asked Victorians if they want to grow Melbourne into a mega-city and the government certainly doesn’t have a mandate for it. Massive growth will come at a cost. You cannot double the size of our city without sacrificing our liveability.

It has rightly been said that the greatest strength of our nation is our diversity. But our other great strength is our liveability. From 2011 to 2017 Melbourne held the Economist Intelligence Unit’s title of the most liveable city in the world. It’s a title we have lost.

That liveability is founded in our suburbs. Each suburb is a unique community. Where I live, we call it our village. Our unique communities have been built by the people in them. They build the homes, run the businesses, volunteer in community groups, and care for the neighbourhoods. In case the premier didn’t get the message when she first announced her activity centres plan, no government has the right to wreck those communities. Especially when they don’t live in them.

It is time to have a proper conversation with Victorians. It’s time this government asked if we want Melbourne to be a mega-city. Do we want to see Melbourne double in size and sacrifice our liveability? Do we want this government to allow the bulldozing of homes in our suburbs and the imposition of skyscrapers in our streets? I don’t.

The premier can call people like me a blocker all she wants. I’d rather be a protector of our suburbs than the premier who wrecks them. Because unlike the premier, I live in this city. So does my family and my children. I want Melbourne to be the most liveable city in the world again, and for it to stay that way. As the premier embarks on her plan to wreck Melbourne, she can count on me standing in her way.

James Newbury is the Liberal member for Brighton in the Victorian parliament and the opposition spokesman for planning.

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