Friendly Jordies (Jordan Shanks) has launched an all out assault on the NSW planning system, claiming “property developers are the shadow government of NSW”.
Shanks claims Sydney is being destroyed by mass overdevelopment as thousands of ugly, tacky high-rise apartments mushroom across the city. In turn, Shanks blames the NSW Government, which he claims has been corrupted by the property development industry.
While Shanks’ concerns are legitimate and he makes excellent points, he has curiously failed to acknowledge the true driver of Sydney’s “slow death”: the federal government’s mass immigration policy.
The fact remains that the only reason why Sydney (and Melbourne) has been swamped with high-rise development is because the federal government decided to throw open the immigration floodgates in 2005:
Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) jumped from an average of 90,500 between 1991 and 2004 to an average of 219,000 between 2005 and 2019 – representing an annual average increase in immigration of 140%.
Accordingly, Sydney added a whopping 1,150,000 people over the 15 years to 2020, with Melbourne adding 1,460,000.
Treasury’s latest Intergenerational Report (IGR) projects that Australia’s population will grow by a whopping 13.1 million people (~50%) over the next 40 years to 38.8 million people. This is equivalent to adding another Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to Australia’s existing population.
The driver of this population surge will be extreme immigration, which is projected to increase to 235,000 annually from 2025-26 onwards versus 215,000 per year in the 2015 IGR:
Back to ‘Big Australia’ immigration.
There is only one outcome from this extreme population growth: thousands more ugly high-rise apartments – as explicitly projected by the Urban Taskforce:
Houses only for the rich.
If Jordan Shanks doesn’t like the overdevelopment of Sydney, he needs to lobby against ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration.