Innovatia

in all the families and communities that live in all the cities, suburbs and towns of Victoria. Victoria is very much like that mural – di- verse, dynamic and individual. But we are strongest when we stick together. The good news is that the vast majority of Victorians have stuck together – looking out for and act- ing in the best interests of one another. The challenge we face now is to stay together – to build on our sense of community as we nav- igate the challenges that lie ahead. Because the testing times are not over. Over the next decade Victoria will face a convergence of environmental, social and economic changes, and we will need to work as a community to adapt to those changes. We need to plan for our community. We need to invest for our community. And we have to come together as a community to bring those plans and investments to life. We also need to face reality. Population growth has been a controversial topic at times over the past 15 years. Victoria has been grow- ing at a rate of 140,000 people a year. Mel- bourne has been projected to become Aus- tralia’s largest city within a decade. And our state’s population has been projected to hit 10 million by 2051. In the short term, COVID-19 halted immigration-based population growth, but migrants are coming again because they’ll want Victoria’s world-class way of life – and Victoria, in turn, needs their skills and energy. In other words, population growth will re- sume at a clip. Which means that by the mid- dle of this century Melbourne’s population will be almost the same – and just as diverse – as the current population of New York City. We need to use the current population pause

to accelerate our plans and investments for growth. We also need to prepare accelerations in: our environment with climate change; our demographics with our ageing and diverse population; and our economy with digital disruption and the creation of an Asian middle class of more than three billion people. To manage this convergence of accelerated change, we need to juggle priorities. In the short term, we need to ensure services and infrastructure are more affordable and acces- sible. That’s why our government is investing record amounts in schools and hospitals, as well as in transformational projects like the Metro Tunnel, North East Link and the West Gate Tunnel. In the medium-to-long term, we need to ensure Victoria has a critical mass of healthy, skilled people to maintain our stand- ard of living. That was the thinking behind Plan Mel- bourne – the government’s 35-year blueprint for managing population growth, growing the economy, creating affordable and accessible housing, improving transport, responding to climate change and creating a city of 20-min- ute neighbourhoods. When I launched Plan Melbourne I said Vic- toria had to commit to a generation of action. And some of the most important actions need to be taken in my portfolio of Housing. Accord- ing to the Housing Affordability Act, housing is affordable if the price of a median dwelling is no more than three times higher than the me- dian annual household income. In Melbourne, the price of a median dwelling is more than 10 times above the median annual household income. That means the city’s housing is se- verely unaffordable.

WRITING ON THE WALL As Melbourne becomes as diverse as New York City, Richard Wynne tells us public and affordable housing is key to nurturing communities. A rden Watson-Cropley. Yulius Antar- es Taime. Ni Na Nguyen, Badia Abdo. Four names. If you live in Melbourne, you may not know the people behind those names, but you’ve probably seen their faces. That’s because they each feature on the larg- est mural in the southern hemisphere, paint- ed on the side of a public-housing tower in Collingwood. The world has changed since that mural was painted by artist Matt Adnate in 2018. Since then, we’ve had the Black Summer bush- fires, then COVID-19 and now post pandemic economic upheavals – and each of these cat- aclysms has tested the resilience of our en- vironment, community and economy. All of which brings me back to that mural. For me, the Collingwood mural is about more than those four individuals. It’s about the 2,500 residents of the public-housing es- tate that their faces represent and, by exten- sion, all the other faces of all the other people

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