It's Getting Worse

Victoria is Australia’s second largest state, centred on Melbourne, a giant megalopolis that within a decade will surpass Sydney as the country’s largest city and approach the scale of London and New York. In the recently conducted state election, won comprehensively by the sitting Labor government, population growth and how to deal with its consequences, arose as a major issue. In this, the political climate was echoing developments at the national scale.

As usual, population covers a myriad of issues. Concern over rising congestion and over-taxed infrastructure assumed central stage in Victoria’s election. Premier Andrews’ Labor government campaigned on meeting the challenges through massively ramping up expenditure on rail and road projects. Matthew Guy, Opposition leader, dwelt on the need to limit overseas immigration and encourage decentralisation of people and jobs to non-metropolitan regions of the state. His campaign was, however, vague on how this was to be achieved.

Decentralisation has a long and hoary history in Australian policy debates.  BY the end of the nineteenth century, Australia, it could be argued, was the most urbanised society in the world. We had a large majority of the populations of the six crown colonies concentrated in designated urban areas, most living and working in the large port city capitals. The neat urban hierarchy beloved of geographers did not exist. Middle-sized cities were absent. It was literally a case of ‘Sydney or the bush’, with a few internal and riverside towns servicing the mining, agricultural and pastoral industries. Politically, rural interests fought above their weight by dominating the upper legislative chambers of the colonial, later state parliaments. This sometimes meant that government power at this level was wielded by rural interests organized into ‘country’ parties or leagues. The constant call for ‘decentralisation’ was code for rural pork barrelling. As the twentieth century progressed, these pockets of privilege-in-rure were progressively dismantled, either by abolishing (Queensland) or democratising the upper chambers and by the relentless growth of the metropolitan capitals. The bleat from the bush was now normally refracted through the coalition of conservative parties dominated by the city-based Liberals, especially at the national level. Only in the historically more decentralised state of Queensland did the political grasp of rural populism linger, though even here reality finally caught up and metropolitan imperatives now prevail there at state and federal levels. More recently, however, a new populism, in tune with similar political sentiments erupting in other democracies, has emerged drawing on deep wells of anger over the increasingly unequal cast of contemporary life.

 The most recent, comprehensive but short-lived attempt to get decentralisation going was ‘the urban and new cities program’ of the Whitlam Labor government in the early 1970s. The main planks – land commissions to keep new urban land affordable, Area Assistance plans to help lagging services in outer suburbia and regional towns catch up, direct grants to local government and a host of areal-targeted social welfare policies – were cut down, along with the special department set up to administer them, by the subsequent conservative Fraser government. Elements of these programs resurfaced during the Hawke-Keating years under Brian Howe’s ‘Better Cities’ Program which had a regional development charter though concentrated on the big cities. Since then, federal governments have been happy to leave questions of urban and regional development to the States, without ensuring the latter’s adequate funding base. Inevitably growth has outstripped service provision and coherent long term planning at metropolitan and beyond scales.

The infrastructure backlog at metropolitan and regional scale has been four decades in the making. Simple fixes are unlikely to make good this sad tale of neglect. But simple fixes have been in no short supply. The conservatives have reached for the population lever. Why not restrict the inflow of migrants, especially since most insist on adding themselves to the burgeoning populations of Sydney and Melbourne? Impractical suggestions include forcing/ ‘encouraging’ recent migrants to first locate outside the big cities. How such a policy would be implemented and at what fiscal and social cost has so far eluded attention. The magnet exerted by Sydney and Melbourne is powered by the prospect of jobs and the existence there of large migrant communities. To reverse the forces drawing new migrants in will require a concerted effort by governments at all levels. Nothing short of a comprehensive national population policy driven by the Prime Minister and Premiers at the Coalition of Australian Governments is called for. Neither major party seems keen to open this cupboard. High immigration has underpinned the continuous growth of the Australian economy over the past two decades and counting. Cutting back to grab ‘a breather’ – as the NSW Premier suggests – may also place a break on the economy, especially if the axe falls on skilled entrants. It’s true that relying on immigration to fuel the economy is lazy policy and takes government attention away from investing in building the necessary skill base among those already here. But making good decades of underinvestment in physical and social infrastructure takes time. In the interim, falling population growth and skill shortages reduce the fiscal capacity of governments to undertake the required investment to close the skills gap. This is a classical example of the policy transition bind. Of course, a full debate over these complex issues would allow consideration of a range of directions outside current comprehension, including approaches put forward by some environmental and ‘de-growth’ advocates. But this political universe is light years from where we are now.

What we are left with is a series of thought bubbles thrown up from time to time, especially as elections approach. It is hardly surprising that the Federal government has played the population card. Anything that distracts attention away from the chaotic state of affairs in Canberra is welcome, particularly if it can be somehow connected with the Morrison government’s ‘strong on borders’ narrative. In fact, the dark side of debates over immigration let loose the dog whistles of war. Blaming migrants, especially the minority arriving from Africa, plays well to the emerging alt-right of Australian politics. Such a strategy reinforces the grip of the right wing ‘base’ of the Parliamentary Liberal Party and their junior allies in the coalition, in the hope of drawing back electoral support from the even more populist groupings like Pauline Hansen’s One Nation Party. However, as recent electoral outcomes during 2018, including the Victorian election, underscore is that moving in that direction loses more votes in the centre. The Coalition risks being left stranded in no-man’s land, since no one can out-Hansen Pauline. John Howard knew this and was careful to craft his message in ways that kept most of the ‘real Liberal’ Party base onside. The results in a series of by-elections in Labor seats, the stunning upset victory of a prominent independent in Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘safe’ Liberal seat and the scale of the Victorian rout, all reinforce the basic truth of ‘the median voter theorem’ in political science. You can’t govern in a parliamentary democracy without controlling the middle ground.

Matthew Guy forgot this basic lesson – and paid the price. He spectacularly misread the signals. Latching onto the population fear emanating from Canberra – and ‘trumpeted’ [sorry] from America –  he offered an unsubtle and unpersuasive ‘tough on crime’ campaign that alienated voters desperate for an end to the divisive, chaotic rhetoric of recent times. His NSW equivalent might ponder this as she prepares for the election in that state next March. Two months after that the Federal election will provide a final test of the politics of fear. Until then – it just keeps getting worse!