ABC National helps UDIA push to cover golf-courses with housing VIC

We predicted this would happen when the Vic government put developers in charge of what happens to the many golfcourses in Melbourne and regional Victoria.  The seizure of these green public and private lands is now being normalised on public media. Affected and ordinary citizens are not being interviewed, or their community organisations, such as Planning Democracy, PPLVic, Sustainable Population Australia, only property developers, who are given an undeserved moral authority via the ABC, simply by promoting their opinion via interviews that allow them to justify overdevelopment and overpopulation without putting any of the obvious logical challenges to their false and self-interested arguments. Australians deserve more, much more from the ABC.

Max Shifman of the Urban Development Institute was interviewed on ABC Radio National 792 Brisbane today around 8.30 am about a push to develop golf courses in Melbourne's South Eastern suburbs - which would include the Mornington Peninsula. This interview used and abused the problem of Australian homelessness as an excuse to overturn hardwon community land and property rights that have to date prevented wholesale slaughter-planning. 

Shifman, without any acknowledgement of the utter irony, pointed to the 'need to house new migrants' who he suggested don't want to live in high rise appartments - contrary to the Vic Government's current 'policies' to build this stylel of dwelling (e.g. activity centres)  - but would rather detached homes. (So would most Australians, Mr Shifman - but not at the price the developer industry likes.)

The obvious rejoinder to the mention of migrants needing such developments to live in was that surely we should be limiting migration if it is causing us to disrupt communities and wildlife.  No such comment. The ABC is so apparently corrupt with regard to pleasing the developer-led agenda.

Of course, we have massive population pressure due to the political pressure groups that have been brought to bear on our polity by the property developer institutes and their financiers, who have got government to engage with a huge expanding migration program.  So, the Urban Development Institute has a history of issuing press releases to justify mass migration, yet we all have to put up with the ABC acting as if mass migration has nothing to do with such interest groups.

Every time I turn on the ABC, they are advocating more housing, more migration, silent on indigenous animals' habitat loss or the general loss of democracy that the continued replacement of Australia's population amounts to.

Shifman referred to policies to retain 20 per cent of the golf-course developments as open space (see candobetter's articles on this subject). That was in response to the interviewer's mild leading questions as to whether open space, "like sports fields," would be retained. 

Max Shifman is the Victorian President of the UDIA. See https://udia.com.au/national-board/ .  Why the ABC interviews him, rather than a host of Victorians who are against what his industry profits from to their detriment, is an open and closed question.  The lightly bantering interview on this crucial and deadly seriously impactful topic was inappropriate but usual for the ABC.