Decentralisation into regional centres connected by high speed rail will provide an abundant supply of affordable housing for many decades to come
Australia is in a housing crisis. House prices are now seven times the national income, double the 3.5 times rate we had only twenty years ago. Owning your own house is now considered unattainable by most millennials.
While there are many reasons why house prices are so high, the fundamental problem is that Australia’s high population growth is highly concentrated in a few large cities. The combination of high population growth and our preference for low density suburban settlement has led to rapid urban sprawl over several decades.
Concentrating Australia’s settlement in capital cities presents challenges for long-term, sustainable growth. State and local governments are straining under the cost of retrofitting more housing and requisite infrastructure for new residents in already crowded capital cities. And this problem is going to continue for the foreseeable future, as Australia’s population is predicted to swell to more than 40 million over the next 40 years.
This pattern of settlement fails to take advantage of Australia’s natural attributes and is unnecessarily expensive for the community to afford. Realistically, we can't keep providing affordable homes solely in the established suburbs of capital cities forever. Instead of trying to cram millions of people into our capital cities, we should create a grander and more enlightened vision for dynamic and thriving regional cities.
There is plenty of evidence that shows spreading growth out of capital cities and into regional areas is preferable to constantly ‘densifying’ our capital cities. Clearly capital cities will benefit if they have to cater for fewer new residents. And clearly regional areas will thrive with more people and larger economies.
What is not often understood is that Australia’s productivity will also increase, as the cost to service new residents in regional areas is so much lower than the cost for capital city residents. This means our standard of living will be higher, and many more people will be able to live the ‘Australian dream’ of a detached home and barbecue in the backyard if we spread our population growth into regional cities.
A national settlement strategy is needed to shift the focus of future population growth from crowded and expensive capital cities to more affordable, high-amenity regional areas. The strategy should seek to rebalance a greater share of capital city population growth and infrastructure investment to suitable regional areas, enabled by a modern, interconnected regional and intercity rail network.
So it is time we stopped politicians from making ad hoc and reactionary policies based on short-term pressures and election cycle politics. It is time we got all levels of government together to develop a national settlement strategy. It is time we developed regional settlement strategy that distributes future population growth based on deliberate, evidence-based strategies - for the common good of all Australians