Dumb, dumber, dumberer: Time for Australia to wise up on the Growth Lobby

A predictably appalling article from Nicholas Reece, City of Melbourne Lord Mayor, and a seasoned career growth enthusiast, has found a cozy spot in Australia's legacy press. Long employed by the ALP to market its message, he is embedded in Victoria's land-speculating university sector, which treats foreign students like crops to be harvested, and rents and sells real-estate to them as if it were a feudal lord.

With Labor somehow somehow managing to stay in power despite only a third of voter support, we can expect a series of questionable decisions regarding international students whose demand for scarce accommodation is a big part of why Melbourne is turning into a slum-dictatorship.  Remarkably, despite being a founding director of The Big Issue, a publication aimed at helping the homeless, Reece seems to overlook the known social and environmental costs of mass immigration, instead extolling how foreign students 'bring so much value to our vibrant city' in "Dumb, dumber, dumberer: Time for Australia to wise up on International Students." 

It is in fact deeply alarming that we seem to have a consistent presence of individuals in all levels of government who find nothing scary about having an open-migration policy between incredibly wealthy but unequal India, with 1.4 billion people, and once-was egalitarian Australia, a largely desert-land which struggles to support 27 million.

It's a little like trying to pour an ocean into a teacup. And the excuse that it may bring in some money won't help us as we drown. We have all this technology but our leaders and influencers are like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, using technology without wisdom. Are they simply evil and stupid, or is there some other explanation?

Could a Catholic education ideology, shared by Mayor Reece and Prime Minister Albanese, have desensitized them to the risk of overpopulation beggaring Australians? Albanese, a self-described “cultural Catholic” raised by a devout mother, credits his St Mary’s and St Joseph’s schooling for his “kindness” and equity focus, with ties lingering through gestures like mourning Pope Francis (The Guardian, April 23, 2025). Reece, baptized Catholic and a Sunday churchgoer for over 20 years, hints at retained values despite his daughter’s atheism (SMH, December 21, 2018).

Such a worldview, rooted in Catholic teachings that frame exponential population growth as manageable through just policies (e.g., housing, oil-based agricultural revolution), may mute criticism among the influential 20% of Australians educated in Catholic schools. ("Give me a boy until he is 10 and I will give you a man.")[1] 

The Vatican’s financial might, managing a $30 billion Australian property empire (outstripping Scentre Group’s 70 hectares),[2]  reinforces this growth-oriented ethos, aligning with Catholic social justice but also with profit-driven development. These Catholic landholdings, dwarfing those of Indigenous groups ($5–10 billion), the Anglican Church ($2–3 billion), and Gina Rinehart ($1–2 billion), fuel an ideology that sees no limits to growth.

The Catholic-shaped positive-ideology dovetails with Property Council of Australia-backed planning schemes (touted as 'reforms') which galvanise growth-driven development intensification and expansion in Victoria and the rest of Australia. Born in London in the 1970s, Reece’s career rocketed in the Australian growth machine: ALP State Secretary, adviser to Gillard, Brumby, Bracks, and Rudd, then councillor under growthist Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle[3] and deputy to Melbourne Mayor Sally Capp (ex-Property Council of Australia Victorian director, Catholic-educated). 

Reece has long been embedded in mainstream media, for instance as a political commentator on Sky News, and as host of Politics HQ, and in the Age as a regular columnist. Reece has a background of being involved in what some might perceive as 'strategic philanthropy' as a  founding member of the Movember Foundation, which raises funds for men's health issues by sponsoring ostentatiously grown moustaches, and he was also a founding director of The Big Issue, a street newspaper, for ten years, although the Big Issue was actually about homelessness. 

NOTES

[1] Ignatius Loyola, Jesuit missionary.  Note that the Catholic Education system in Australia was the only one able to survive alongside the State School System and that has been attributed to the size of the Catholic immigration stream, which it encouraged.

[2] Scentre Group is an Australian real estate company managing Westfield shopping centres, owning 42 properties (70 hectares) across Australia and New Zealand, valued at ~$38 billion (2024).  Publicly listed on ASX (SCG), primarily owned by institutional investors (e.g., UniSuper, Vanguard) and retail shareholders. No single dominant owner; managed by CEO Elliott Rusanow.

[3] In a 2014 "Great Population Debate" with Kelvin Thomson about Melbourne's population growth, Doyle's maine argument was false and excessively shallow - that you needed a large population to get a good cappucino. He also subscribed to the propaganda that growth was inevitable.

[4] The 17% increase in Melbourne’s homelessness since 2016 was sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census data, specifically comparing 2016 and 2021 figures. The 2016 Census recorded 116,000 homeless people nationally, with Melbourne’s share included in Victoria’s 24,817. By 2021, Victoria’s homeless population rose to 30,660 (a 24% increase), and Melbourne’s City of Melbourne recorded 1,163 homeless individuals, up from ~994 in 2016, equating to a ~17% local increase. This was cross-referenced with Council to Homeless Persons and The Age (2023) reports.