Melbourne City
Australia's fastest-growing city added 142,600 people in one year — 90% from overseas migration — while housing approvals run at half the rate needed, a positive-feedback loop with no equilibrium.
Melbourne added 142,600 people in a single year to 2024 — the largest population jump of any Australian city — with overseas migration accounting for roughly 90% of that growth. Greater Melbourne's 5.35 million residents make it Australia's second-largest city, but Planning Victoria projects it will reach 9 million and overtake Sydney within decades, with Victoria's total population hitting 10 million by 2051.
Melbourne's entire modern growth model rests on a single input: international migration at rates that consistently exceed federal forecasts. Net overseas migration hit 528,000 nationally in 2022-23, more than double the long-run average of 200,000-250,000, and Melbourne absorbs a disproportionate share. This creates the economic engine — a A$127 billion gross regional product in 2023-24, headquarters of five of Australia's ten largest corporations, and a 28th-place ranking in the Global Financial Centres Index — but simultaneously overwhelms the housing supply.
Housing approvals ran at 89,734 in 2024, roughly half the rate needed to meet the federal government's 1.2 million homes target by 2029. The gap between population growth and housing construction is not a policy failure waiting to be fixed; it is a structural feature of a growth model that requires migration to exceed planning capacity. Melbourne has been here before. The 1850s Victorian gold rush transformed it from a small settlement into 'Marvellous Melbourne,' one of the wealthiest cities on Earth, and briefly made it larger than Sydney.
The rivalry between the two cities was so intense that neither would accept the other as national capital when Australia federated in 1901, producing the compromise of Canberra — built from scratch 100 miles from Sydney. Today's growth follows the same positive-feedback pattern: migrants cluster where previous migrants settled, creating ethnic networks, employment pipelines, and institutional knowledge that attract the next wave. Each arrival makes the next more likely.
In ecology, this is preferential attachment — the mechanism that explains why some nodes in a network accumulate connections faster than others, not through superior quality but through the compounding advantage of being chosen first.