The NSW Premier, Chris Minns, has done a “sit down” interview. Wow, the issue at hand must be important.
It is, but, inevitably, what the current Premier has to contribute on the topic is narrow, paltry, self-serving and insignificant. At least there is a politician actually addressing a real problem. With a non-solution, of course. Mostly, of course, politicians address non-problems with non-solutions.
Minns’ current worry is that young people are leaving Sydney, in droves. They can’t afford to live there anymore.
‘It doesn’t have a future': The plan to save Sydney from itself.
NSW Premier Chris Minns warns Sydney has “no future” unless an alarming trend is reversed – and he has a plan to save the city from a mass exodus.
The Premier’s interest in the state of play in Sydney has been piqued by a recent report of the NSW Productivity Commission:
Last month, a stark report from the NSW Productivity Commission warned that Sydney lost twice as many young people than it gained in a five-year period.
According to the data, about 35,000 people aged 30 to 40 moved to Sydney between 2016 and 2021, – but an estimated 70,000 fled.
Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat said the city is at risk of becoming “the city with no grandchildren”.
“Sydney is losing its 30- to 40-year-olds,” Mr Achterstraat said, adding authorities need to act now.
“Many young families are leaving Sydney because they can’t afford to buy a home, or they can only afford one in the outer suburbs with a long commute.”
Minns turns out to be addressing one eighth of the problem, and his “solution” is, indeed, part of at least one of the problems.
The first task in policy development is problem definition.
Here, Minns fails miserably. He hardly kisses the surface, let alone scratches it. To be fair, there is little that a NSW Premier can do to fix Sydney’s problems. These problems are embedded, and probably now unfixable, certainly not fixable by a State government. The issues are far higher than that particular pay grade. And Minns didn’t cause the problems. But the least he could do would be to recognise them in their totality, and not simply focus on his version of addressing one of them.
The roots of the problems confronting our major cities are far deeper than any current conversation about them is touching. They are result of both the work of the “good intentions paving company”, that is, they are the unforeseen and unintended outcomes of a raft of well-meant policies combined with incrementalism. Band-aid upon band-aid. Worse, the problems now faced by our bloated, unworkable cities are also the outcome of deliberate and sometimes sinister intentions. The latter might be summed up in one word, ideology.
It turns out that there are eight core ideologies that have ruined our major cities. And “ruin” takes in much more than simple affordability. It includes the desecration of heritage, out-of-control population growth, the absence of an aesthetic worthy of the name, overcrowding, transport chaos, long commutes, cultural decline, the development of muti-monocultural enclaves, the concentration-in-place of old-world hatreds and enmities, and lost Australianness.
And, of course, the cost of living.
Our cities are unrecognisable from their roots. Many, certainly those who run the place, would say “great”. That’s what we wanted, all along. The rest of us are simply sullen and powerless.
What are the eight damning ideologies?
First, feminism.
Getting 1970s women to desire wage slavery over personal autonomy and lifestyle freedom was a state/corporate scam for the ages. Governments got double the taxes and business got cheap, plentiful labour. So, downward pressure on wages followed. How did feminism wreck cities? Well, cities are where the jobs desired by women mostly are, and so that is where they have to live. Population growth instantly puts upward pressure on housing costs. And, after women invaded the workplace, housing costs instantly doubled. Couples could suddenly afford bigger and better homes. Hey presto! Developers, who, by and large, run State governments, were licking their chops. Everyone know that Sydney people only ever talk about two things, and one of these is property prices. (The other is schools).
Second, Public-Private Partnerships, or the fusion of capitalism and socialism.
PPPs are, of course the preferred, literally fascist model of the Great Reset and its progenitor, the World Economic Forum. It all started out as part of the 1980s neo-liberal agenda that embraced, “new public management”, privatisation, out-sourcing, offshoring, and the rest. We now know that, bad actors also being located in the private sector as well as in government, we now simply have unaccountable governance.
No hybrid vigour here, merely crony socialism.
And with a far wider remit than the oligarchs ever had back in the day. We see the fruits of PPPs in the Ukraine money laundering scheme, the coming of Digital ID, the Covid State, social media fact checking and the broader censorship industrial complex. Oh, and the legacy media, which today largely functions as a propaganda arm of the State and is funded by Big Pharma, with all that that entails.
At the local level, we see the evil of PPPs in the cost of toll roads. It is simply an exorbitant form of congestion tax. The numbers involved are astronomical. $195 billion over the next three decades. Alexandra Smith at (paywalled) The Sydney Morning Herald writes:
Sydney’s long-awaited review into the city’s patchwork of motorways reveals that motorists will pay $195 billion on tolls over the next 37 years, largely as a result of previous governments prioritising the financial concerns of tolling giants above managing traffic on the city’s congested roads.
Professor Allan Fels has done a review of the issue. Naturally, the current NSW Government politicised it.
The independent Toll Review interim report, handed down today by Professor Allan Fels, lays bare the damage wrought by toll road privatisation of the former government and the huge task of reform required to ease the burden on motorists.
https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/toll-review-identifies-a-road-to-a-fairer-system-for-motorists
Making this party political, while not remotely unexpected, ignores the bigger issue that both branches of the UniParty completely support the PPP model of governance, both domestically within Australia and at the supra-national level.
Third, new urbanism.
New urbanism is a trendy way of saying, build more apartments, especially over railway stations.
It is the best, indeed the only, idea that governments and their developer mates have come up with in over thirty years of urban planning law and thinking. It is a concoction of academic planners and with all its European, light rail driven flavour, it naturally appeals to the progressives. The enemy – and there is always an enemy – is urban sprawl. Every planning student going through an Australian university – and I taught some of them for a decade – is told to hate sprawl. Naturally, high rise appeals to developers. Opposing this heritage-killing policy can easily and irrelevantly be portrayed as “nimbyism”.
If high and medium density living was meant to get cars off the roads, it hasn’t. We are building more toll roads than ever. With the collapse of multiple building companies, along with some of the gerry-built edifices they have erected, we have landed the miserable residents who inhabit them in a dark place.
Two things have made a nonsense of the simplistic theory that we can concentrate homes and jobs on main transport routes. First, jobs across our cities are spread out, not conveniently clustered around public transport. And second, now half the workforce works from home anyway! They don’t have to leave the building. Oops.
Sadly, the NSW Premier sees this ideology as a solution rather than a problem.
Fourth, mass immigration.
Jordan Knight, writing at The Spectator Australia this week, took aim at Minns’ mastery of data:
One fact he missed – and one that is impossible to ignore during a housing crisis – is that New South Wales added 174,000 migrants to its population last year.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-real-reason-young-people-are-leaving-sydney/
The influx of gazillions of foreigners, who nobody ever voted to receive and who, naturally, all gravitate to the cities. True, this is not the work of State governments. But the State governments which complain – like that of Bob Carr – do have the capacity to influence their mates in Canberra. They belong to the same parties. Bob Carr even went to Canberra, and became, briefly, without being elected, Foreign Minister.
Mass immigration, accelerating and out-of-control as we speak, has devastated the cities. It fuels inflation, it drives up housing costs, forcing (as we have seen) young people out, it does not advance multiculturalism, it de-Australianises the country, it brings more ready-to-be-victim people in, it expands the welfare state, it diminishes English as our first language.
As Konstantin Kisin has said, many of them hate us before they get here.
Fifth, multiculturalism.
Of course, this is the ideology behind much of the push for mass immigration, though, as we have seen, it isn’t the only one.
Multiculturalism-as-policy was gifted to us by Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970s. It has become core ideology for the UniParty. Of course, the theory lagged the practice by about a decade. It was Harold Holt that dismantled the so-called White Australia policy, which had delivered a socially cohesive – boring to many, of course – and economically strong nation over nearly seven decades. In doing so, Holt unleashed, very slowly at first, an eventual tsunami of in-migrants.
Celebrating diversity of skin colour and culture has led to many outcomes, and not all are favourable.
The extent of the new, quickly embedded ideology was clear by the late 1990s, when both major parties descended upon Pauline Hanson, who turned out to be very prescient, indeed, in her analysis of the speed of immigration policy change, and who emerged as Australia’s Enoch Powell. He too, was eviscerated by the elites in his own country, Great Britain. We don’t have the “rivers of blood” that Powell foreshadowed, or Parisien banlieues, but we don’t look and feel much like Australia any more, either. More Londonistan, down under.
Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal Party prior to the 1996 election, but still won the seat she contested.
Sixth, globalisation.
Globalisation was hated by the old left, personified by Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz (in his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents), and is embraced with gusto by the new. It has morphed from a phenomenon to an ideology, called globalism. A basic definition of globalisation is as follows:
The process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.
A useful summary can be found here:
https://www.piie.com/microsites/globalization/what-is-globalization
Essentially, globalisation demanded and was enabled by policies at the national level that dissolved borders and so facilitated the easy movement of people, goods, labour and capital between nations. It heralded the coming of the “borderless world”, as McKinsey’s Kenichi Ohmae called it (with great affection).
It took jobs from poor people in rich countries and gave them to even poorer people in poor countries. It enabled arbitrage and a hundred other ways for multinational corporations to take cream off the top. It created the groundwork for mass migration from third world, post-colonial countries to the nations that formerly oppressed them, taking jobs afresh from the working classes of the West.
Roger Scruton, in his 2017 mini-masterpiece, Where We Are: the State of Britain Now, had a whole chapter on the impacts of globalisation. He spoke of companies that simply come into the cities, take up residence for a time, repatriate profits to faraway places, provide a few local jobs for a short while, make a pile of money out of real estate inflation, then leave. Scruton marked the decision to allow foreigners to own property in Britain as a critical step along the path to destruction.
Global city boosters will dispute any downsides of globalisation for the cities that have taken advantage of their new-found status. Global city sceptics point to the increased inequalities that have occurred, and the growth pressures that we now experience. This is where the rubber hits the road. Our cities are now inhabited by companies which have no local loyalty, no local connect. They could be anywhere. They do not create or sustain communities or social cohesion.
The inhabitants of the cities’ hinterlands have been placed further on the outer, in terms of their economies, the loss of their young people to the city (ironically, given Minns’ concerns) and the further embedding of city-centrism in politics and infrastructure spending.
Seventh, woke.
Woke ideology isn’t confined to the cities, but it was born there and finds its most natural home there.
It is here the elites operate. It is where most of the universities are, and the universities are, these days, little more than indoctrination houses. Woke is in your face, 24/7. The cities are taken over by month long gay parades. Street signs like that at Macquarie University, “Racism not welcome here”. And, clearly, not just Macquarie.
By relentless street advertorials for multiculturalism paid for by Sydney City Council. By rolling Palestinian protests that proclaim gassing the Jews as a recommended activity. By the growth of signs in foreign languages. By the existence of non-Australian, monocultural, favelas (as Jordan Knight calls them), no-go urban areas.
Large cities are where woke comes to live.
Eighth, brutalist architecture
Our major cities suffer from urban blight.
When Napoleon III set about redesigning Paris, the world changed. It got a bit uglier. Le Corbusier finished the job in the twentieth century.
It was French-Swiss Modernist architect Le Corbusier who began building brutalist structures. He began designing in such a manner in the 1950s, and they soon became popular worldwide. Other architects who helped popularise brutalist design include Alison and Peter Smithson, Marcel Breuer, and Ernő Goldfinger.
The combination of the escalating destruction of older, elegant, aesthetically pleasing architecture and the coming of brutalism have combined to create desolate, dark places in our cities. Ironically, when governments and developers w trying to destroy The Rocks in Sydney back in the 1970s, it was a communist unionist, Jack Mundy, who, through “green bans”, helped to save at least some of the city.
I visited this issue some years back.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/poor-sydney-what-theyve-done-to-you/
On this issue, James Stevens Curl’s book, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, is an indispensable guide. As the publisher notes:
In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalleled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice.
Eight ideologies have destroyed our cities.
All in all, the coming of the Minns Government to Macquarie Street has simply meant a continuation of Sydney’s disastrous new urbanism. Planning is one of the few things that a State government can do something about. Sadly, developers give lots of money to both major parties. That is why they seldom fear a change of government in the Rum Corps State.
Many of the other city-destroying ideologies are way beyond Minns’ remit. So, he should be very circumspect about achieving likely improvements through tinkering with railway stations.
Paul Collits
15 March 2024
All of the comments in this article are valid but the one over riding reason for crazy property prices is the insane immigration policy foisted on the nation by incredible greed and stupidity in the Clowns In Power.
Too many people competing for too few resources. Result - chaos.
There is no intrinsic advantage in a population level beyond what is viable in the long term. But there are many extreme disadvantages.
Very valid arguments. Now the planning department is relaxing the rules even more. In My area south of Sydney, Dapto, there are plans for high rise, high density housing, low cost housing and more social housing. If there is a block of land or a see shops that are old and need someone to lobe them they are knocked down and lo and behold high rise will occur. I did the feedback form bemoaning this very silly idea to relax the panning and bud more high rise but I have very little faith that any notice will be taken.
Driving through Sydney these days is a dystopian nightmare. High rise and communist style buildings everywhere. Has anyone been to Meadowbank lately? It looks like a Gulag or China.
Immigration needs to stop.