State Premiers Tell Young Families To Be Happy With Their Wage Cage And Saying The "I" Word Makes You A Bad Person

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

There is a quiet consensus that has settled over Australian politics, particularly at the state level, and it goes something like this. The cities will keep growing. The fringes will keep spreading. Public land will keep being sold. And young families will be expected to adapt, emotionally and financially, without asking too many questions about how any of this is supposed to work.

Premiers in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have spoken often about housing supply, density and growth. They speak in the language of inevitability. Population increases are framed as natural, like tides or gravity. The solution, we are told, is to build more dwellings wherever possible, ideally near existing cities where jobs already are and where infrastructure might eventually catch up. If you don't want 2000 new homes in your neighbourhood, you're a cunt.

What is rarely discussed is the narrowing of choice this creates. For many young families, life now presents two broadly acceptable options. One is to remain close to the city in a shitbox apartment, devoting a large share of income to paying off this worthless skytent and maintaining a permanent relationship with growing financial insecurity. The other is to move further out, into new developments that promise affordability but deliver long commutes, thin services, no backyards, no community and a lingering sense of abject futility.

This is presented as flexibility. It is, more accurately, nefarious constraint.

Decentralisation used to sit somewhere in the background of Australian policy thinking. Not as a slogan, but as a practical idea. Move jobs, institutions and services. Build hospitals, universities and courts outside capital cities. Connect them with quick, efficient transport options to the city. Give people reasons to live where land is cheaper and life might be slower. That idea has not been formally abandoned. It has simply been overtaken by easier options.

Selling public land is easier than building regional economies. Rezoning inner and outer metropolitan areas is the path of least resistance for government. Approving ugly apartments is easier than committing to long-term regional investment that might take decades to pay off.

The impending sale of surplus defence land and the ongoing release of state-owned sites fit neatly into this pattern. These are not framed as ideological choices. They are framed as practical responses to housing pressure. Land must be used. Assets must be activated. Supply must be increased. The fact that much of this development reinforces existing urban concentration is treated as incidental.

There is also a noticeable tension around what cannot be said. Any suggestion that population growth might actually interact with waning housing supply, stretched infrastructure or stomped-on wages is met with unease. The word immigration hovers over these discussions like a live wire above a bath. It is acknowledged as essential, celebrated as a value, and simultaneously declared irrelevant to questions of planning and capacity. More taxpayers equals more tax.

This creates an odd rhetorical environment. Growth is inevitable, but its consequences are taboo. Infrastructure will arrive, but not yet. Housing will be built, but not where people want space. Regional Australia is full of opportunity, but not enough to move jobs there.

Young families are asked to recalibrate expectations. Space becomes indulgence. Stability becomes entitlement. Long commutes become character-building. The ability to imagine a future that resembles anything like the past is treated as nostalgia.

None of this is framed as cruelty. It is framed as realism. But realism, when repeated often enough, becomes ideology. And the ideology is simple. The system is working. Adapt to it. And whatever you do, do not ask whether it could have been designed differently. In the end, we're selling defence land to developers, so we can afford to buy nuclear submarines, to protect us from our biggest trading partner and the largest buyer of new developments in each state capital.

More to come.