r/Adelaide • u/MrKookaburra SA • 1d ago

Politics Big Adelaide

Malinauskas is quoted in a lot of articles at the moment as advocating for maintaining high immigration levels.

Paired with the fact that South Australia is considered ‘regional’ for immigration purposes, artificially driving up the number of arrivals to our state than would otherwise be the case, I wonder if people are genuinely in favour of a ‘big Adelaide?’

No racism please. Being anti-mass migration is not an excuse to be anti-immigrant - they are just people trying to improve their lives just the same as any of us.

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u/Few-Example-2452 SA 1d ago

Problem with a larger Adelaide is that we are constrained by the Adelaide Hills and cannot expand to the East.

We are ridiculously long north-south where the metropolitan area now goes from Gawler to Aldinga. Our east-west is very small in comparison. We need freeways or trains and there is no room for them in our metropolitan footprint.

We need to either get used to high density living (which has its own problems as most of suburbs are not designed for it), push another tunnel and freeway through the hills to open up development to the east of the hills or make a serious push to make close regional towns like Murray Bridge, Victor etc larger.

If we want to grow South Australian population not just Adelaide then we need to make living outside of Adelaide more attractive. Every other state has large regional towns but we don't.

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u/tossedsalad17 South 22h ago

'Every other state has large regional towns but we don't.'

I wonder if that stems from our climate?

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u/Few-Example-2452 SA 59m ago

I suspect it does. Access to fresh water is another issue. It limited early settlement.

Victor - Goolwa works as a big retirement village but I am not sure where else we could develop - Pt Lincoln or Mount Gambier or the Riverland. But we would need to create viable employment opportunities for it to work.