An Important News Australia

Australia’s new boom towns: the suburbs squeezing in tens of thousands more residents

Suburbs across our major cities are skyrocketing in population, some by as much as 1300 per cent. It’s creating problems that need radical solutions.

Bullsbrook is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of place. The community of 6000, which lies 45km northeast of Perth, consists of a small parade of shops by the grand-sounding but not very huge Great Northern Highway and a few tidy tree-lined streets peering onto the bushland beyond.

This semirural suburb is a quiet place to live, bar the screech of the odd jet landing at RAAF Pearce next door.

But it’s about to get a lot nosier. Bitumen is slowly replacing farmland, undergrowth is being cleared for new homes, and for sale signs are being hammered into patches of dirt.

Bullsbrook is at the forefront of a population explosion. Every year, 800 houses are expected to be built here. By 2051 as many as 85,000 people could call Bullsbrook home. That’s a 1300 per cent increase in residents and would make it almost twice the size of Bunbury, Western Australia’s fourth largest city. It’s just one of many suburbs stretched across the country that are about to see many, many more residents.

Local government areas (LGAs) in major cities are busy rezoning land to make the boom towns of tomorrow. And the boom is rarely as pronounced as in the outer suburbs.

City of Swan council, of which Bullsbrook is part and which expects its population to double to more than 300,000 in the next three decades, states it wants Bullsbrook to be a “liveable town that is sustainable, vibrant and prosperous”.

But questions are being asked about how sustainable this swelling of suburbia is. Population watchers, who spoke to news.com.au, said the trend to keep expanding our cities outwards was “locking in tidal waves of congestion and deprivation”.

BOOM SUBURBS TO GET EVEN MORE RESIDENTS
Every few years, state governments do some crystal ball gazing to estimate how many people will move into each LGA.

The most recent figures, released last year, forecast the population of many was set to shoot up far quicker then expected.

City of Swan is now expecting 40,000 more residents over the next decade than originally estimated just three years previously, The Australian reported.

Blacktown, in Sydney’s west, already has 350,000 residents. By 2031 it could be a city of 526,000, at least 100,000 more people than live in Canberra.

Yet, in 2016, the NSW Government estimated Blacktown’s population jump would be considerably lower to 480,000.While some council areas and suburbs experiencing population booms are nearer CBDs – Melbourne and Sydney’s Burwood, for instance – most are far further out. In Sydney that includes Liverpool, Penrith and the Hills; in Melbourne, Casey, Wyndham and Melton; and in Queensland, Ipswich, Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast.

Professor John Stanley from the University of Sydney’s Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, told news.com.au that Melbourne had been growing at breakneck speed, piling on 25 per cent more people in 10 years, a figure almost unmatched globally.

“When you grow at that speed, the more affordable places are going to be on the fringe,” he said.

That means long commutes of an hour – sometimes much more – to get to where the jobs are.

ABS data has shown that Melbourne’s outer suburbs now accounted for 57.5 per cent of the city’s population growth. However, in Melbourne’s fringe there are just 389 jobs for 1000 residents compared to the city’s core where there are 1229 per 1000 residents.

“There are very few services and jobs in these new suburbs so you lock in this tidal wave of congestion and disadvantage,” he said.

A few kilometres to the west of Bullsbrook, Perth’s new $1 billion NorthLink motorway is taking shape. City of Swan CEO Mike Foley told news.com.au the suburb was currently “well serviced by several major transport networks”, That would improve with NorthLink as it could cut travel times by as much as 50 per cent, he added.

But while a railway line bisects the suburb, commuter trains terminate 30km south. And there are just a handful of buses a day to Bullsbrook

Stringing out new suburbs on the side of highways doesn’t impress Prof Stanley.

“You can’t just build more freeways. They may reduce congestion initially but they only encourage further sprawl which just sees the traffic build up.

“You need public transport. You need buses before houses. The problem with big infrastructure projects is what is forgotten is the small stuff like walking and cycling and making communities.

“We spend massive amounts on road and rail projects when there is a better return on the small stuff.”

A new suburb that Prof Stanley said was doing it right was Springfield, southwest of Brisbane, which has shops, schools, offices, a hospital as well as CBD rail and road links.