There are already places in Melbourne that I’d point blank refuse to live in. For the sake of simplicity let’s call it anywhere 10km out from the CBD.

The reason?

Bugger all infrastructure, extremely limited job opportunities (not everyone wants to be a carpenter, plumber or mechanic) and having to live with a bunch of poor people and struggling families.

This is the reality of Melbourne today. And yet instead of working on solving our current urban sprawl problems, Victorian parliament yesterday decided that Melbourne could do with a further expansion of 43,600 hectares.

In light of this carefully thought out and well planned decision I have just one question:

Seriously, are you guys out of your bloody minds?

As it is, living on the fringes of Melbourne means you have to rely on a car and even if you want to use public transport it takes half the day to get anywhere. Then there’s the fact that if you want a decent career you’re looking at spending half your natural life commuting back and forth from the CBD or inner suburbs.

Then there’s the fact that there’s nothing to do entertainment wise except run around bashing Indians or pretending to be in a Sudanese gang and beat randoms up at train stations. Coles shuts at midnight so unless you’re lucky to have a 24hr McDonalds nearby, come the weekend you’re shit out of luck.

A trip into the city isn’t much point either. If you leave on a Saturday night to head out by the time you get anywhere it’s almost Monday morning and time to go home again.

Yet despite this, Victorian parliament has signed off on expansion areas in Melbourne’s far west, north and south east. As if these fringe area’s weren’t hellholey enough to live in, we’re going to start building houses even further out.

The reason for this madness?

Developers argue the decision, and any subsequent residential development, will ease pressure on housing supply and affordability.


So ultimately it comes down to housing affordability. People think houses cost too much? Cool, so we’ll start building McMansions in the middle of nowhere… because that’s where people want to live.

It’s not like this new housing is going to be high density sensible housing either. You can bet it’s going to be full of carefully planned sprawling 19 bedroom houses with 8 home theatre rooms, 3 kitchens, 8 garage car port and 4 swimming pools.

Everytime the government has approved an expansion on Melbourne’s fringes this is exactly what’s happened. Meanwhile housing demand for the rest of Melbourne doesn’t change because people still don’t want to live in barren wasteland suburbs.

The only reason housing is cheap in these new development areas is because they have about as much functionality as dropping two horny quadreplegics on either side of a football field in an effort to study human sexual activity.

There’s a threshold where cheaper housing is outweighed by the massive detrimental effect on the quality of life you accept when moving there. As far as Melbourne goes, we surpassed that threshold years ago… probably around the time Caroline Springs et al. were being advertised ad nauseum on tv.

Speaking of which, anyone care to comment on the state of infrastructure in those areas, now that they’ve been around for a good decade or so. Last I remember there wasn’t any train or tram services out that way being built anytime soon.

Having moved to Taiwan last year I’ve come to appreciate high density housing even more. Families still have 4-5 bedroom houses here with home theatre rooms but the difference is they build up on small blocks of lands. Unless you live in the country, yards are non existent meaning public parks are all the more utilised (when was the last time you saw kids or anyone using the planned parks scatter over the outer suburbs?).

Along with this you of course have your apartments and what not offering diversity in accommodation. Infact the only thing that’s missing here are the barge arse houses we’ve come to expect from housing developments back in Australia.

The trade off? Nobody unwillingly has to live miles away in a backwater far from any form of infrastructure. This is on an island roughly the size of Victoria but with the population of Australia living in it too.

Yet there’s still vast ranges and open areas of scenic ranges to enjoy despite the population concentration.

Ever expanding Melbourne, or any Australian cities borders is simply put a short sighted ridiculously stupid idea. Furthermore it flies in the face of Gillard’s recent withdrawal of support from Rudd’s ‘Big Australia’ vision of half the worlds population living here by 2035.

As much as the baby boomers will tell you it’s not so, the fact of the matter is that it’s building up, and not across that is going to solve our housing problems. Either that or we need to first establish credible outer suburb business districts.

Given that mostly poor people flock to the outer suburbs I doubt this is going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime with the government continuing to expand Melbourne horizontally it’s a fair bet that for the next ten to twenty years or so things are going to remain horribly stuffed.

And here’s the biggest joke of all;

The government says it has an integrated housing and transport plan with housing-growth areas tied to existing or planned transport links.


Sorry, what existing transport links? And as for planning? Well we all know how long that takes or worse still never happens.

As other cities enjoy their world class facilities and infrastructure focusing on a smaller centralised concentrated populations it appears Australia is determined to head in the opposite direction.

Thank Christ I got out of there when I did. As much as I love the place, watching Australia attempt to further develop itself from an outside perspective is utterly painful to watch.

I wonder if proposals like this would get voted in part of the deal was forcing Victoria’s state politicians to move into these new areas and commute into the city on a daily basis? Somehow I think not.



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