Australia’s population ticked over to 25 million at around 11.00 pm on Tuesday, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, and Melbourne is supporting a significant amount of the growth.
Melbourne is the nation’s fastest-growing city. Its current CBD population alone is more than 44,000, an increase of 4 per cent since 2017.
City of Melbourne’s Planning Portfolio Chairperson, Nicholas Reece, said he doesn’t expect this growth to slow.
“In the space of the next 10-15 years Melbourne’s population will be equal to that of present-day London,” Mr Reece said.
Migration has a significant role in population growth in Australia, more than half of those currently living in Melbourne’s CBD were born overseas.
Pantavanh Keobolith, 24, moved to Australia from Laos in 2016 after receiving a government scholarship.
She chose to live in Melbourne because her mother had friends here, she also just liked the idea of living in the city.
“It seems like a beautiful city to live in, and people seem so friendly,” she said.
She’s just one of the many to have moved to Melbourne for the opportunities it offers.
People strolling through Degraves Street in Melbourne. (Photo: Meg Sydes)
In a speech to the Business Council of Australia, Citizenship Minister Alan Tudge said nearly all international migration is to Melbourne and Sydney, causing congestion within the cities.
Throughout the last financial year, more than 111,000 skilled migrants arrived in the country but nearly 90 per cent of those settled inside of these two major cities.
Dr Liz Taylor, from the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, said while the CBD might be better placed in terms of infrastructure to support growth, Melbourne’s outer suburbs are expected to struggle.
“New suburbs are expected to accommodate an extra half a million new homes over the next 35 years,” she said.
“If the population was distributed more evenly, there would not be the congestion pressures that we have today in Melbourne and Sydney,” said Citizenship Minister Tudge.
(Featured image: tourist takes a photo of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. Photo: Meg Sydes)
