A story from 13 October by Peter Hartcher about the NSW premier’s about-face on immigration reveals unease felt by the Liberal Party in NSW in the run-up to the March election. Opinion polls have them neck-and-neck with Labor. The ALP had called for a cut to numbers of migrants arriving in Australia because they usually go to either Sydney or Melbourne.
I wrote about the election back on 28 June in a blogpost that detailed the fact that poor decisions – or a deliberate policy by the then-premier, Bob Carr – dating from as far back as the 1990s had led to the congestion that Sydneysiders now see in their city. And the complaints are coming from the well-off in the inner suburbs, where state government planning action favouring property developers has led to residents’ groups teaming up with municipal councils to protest against what they see as overdevelopment. There was a story in Neighbourhood Paper last year that was written by a resident of one of these suburbs, and he was vocal in condemning the emergence of high-rise apartment buildings and the traffic congestion that has resulted from higher housing densities in the city.
The other day as I was travelling on the light rail to Central Station on my way to Cronulla to have a walk, I sat on the tram and nearby two women were talking. One of them had entered the carriage at the casino and had asked the woman sitting two seats away from me where to apply her Opal card to pay for the trip. She had an English accent. The Australian woman – middle-aged, well-dressed, polite – told her how the system works and then they got to chatting.
The Englishwoman told her new friend that she had only come to Sydney for a couple of days and was on that day going to Circular Quay for sightseeing. The Australian woman asked her how she found the city – we had just crossed George Street, where the construction site goes all the way down to the water at the northern end of the CBD – and she then said something about her own circumstances. She and her husband (I assumed it was her husband she included in the pronoun “we”) were living in the inner west but all the new apartment construction had made them decide to move to a small house they owned in Bundeena, which is just south of Cronulla. The town is accessed from Cronulla by a small ferry, she said.
A few days ago on this blog I wrote about a trip I had made to Cronulla some weeks earlier. On that trip, which marked my first-ever visit to the suburb, I noticed how many apartments there are in the place, many dating from the 1970s with their red double-brick construction and small balconies. There are new cranes visible at different points along the train’s route to the beach, indicative of continued demand for homes in Sydney. I read somewhere that there are currently around 320 cranes on the skyline in Sydney.
On 21 September I wrote a post about Australia’s multiculturalism, and the post included the following:
I wrote about the election back on 28 June in a blogpost that detailed the fact that poor decisions – or a deliberate policy by the then-premier, Bob Carr – dating from as far back as the 1990s had led to the congestion that Sydneysiders now see in their city. And the complaints are coming from the well-off in the inner suburbs, where state government planning action favouring property developers has led to residents’ groups teaming up with municipal councils to protest against what they see as overdevelopment. There was a story in Neighbourhood Paper last year that was written by a resident of one of these suburbs, and he was vocal in condemning the emergence of high-rise apartment buildings and the traffic congestion that has resulted from higher housing densities in the city.
The other day as I was travelling on the light rail to Central Station on my way to Cronulla to have a walk, I sat on the tram and nearby two women were talking. One of them had entered the carriage at the casino and had asked the woman sitting two seats away from me where to apply her Opal card to pay for the trip. She had an English accent. The Australian woman – middle-aged, well-dressed, polite – told her how the system works and then they got to chatting.
The Englishwoman told her new friend that she had only come to Sydney for a couple of days and was on that day going to Circular Quay for sightseeing. The Australian woman asked her how she found the city – we had just crossed George Street, where the construction site goes all the way down to the water at the northern end of the CBD – and she then said something about her own circumstances. She and her husband (I assumed it was her husband she included in the pronoun “we”) were living in the inner west but all the new apartment construction had made them decide to move to a small house they owned in Bundeena, which is just south of Cronulla. The town is accessed from Cronulla by a small ferry, she said.
A few days ago on this blog I wrote about a trip I had made to Cronulla some weeks earlier. On that trip, which marked my first-ever visit to the suburb, I noticed how many apartments there are in the place, many dating from the 1970s with their red double-brick construction and small balconies. There are new cranes visible at different points along the train’s route to the beach, indicative of continued demand for homes in Sydney. I read somewhere that there are currently around 320 cranes on the skyline in Sydney.
On 21 September I wrote a post about Australia’s multiculturalism, and the post included the following:
Australia adopted multiculturalism in 1974 during the years of the Whitlam Labor government, becoming just the second country in the world to do so (after Canada), and the succeeding Fraser Liberal (conservative) government kept the policy in place. Now, over half of the population has at least one parent who was born overseas. The population is growing at a rate of 1.7 percent annually, which is over twice the rate as that which applies in the US. As of July, Australia had the fifth-strongest growing population of all OECD countries. Australia has not had a recession for something like 26 years.Now, the ALP’s legacy of underinvestment threatens to damage the successful post-war consensus that had been forged with the participation of both major parties. This is a terrible outcome for Sydney and for Australia, because we had been doing so well before the populist rhetoric that some – particularly Greens voters living in the inner suburbs of Sydney – have encouraged and that the NSW premier and others have answered with public statements. Now, the new federal population minister is even talking about doing something the Chinese already do: limit where people can live when they migrate to the country. I feel ashamed to call myself Australian.
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