These ‘satellite cities’ could reshape Melbourne. Locals are pushing for jobs over housing

As a girl, Jan Goates would sneak away from home to play in the red brick silos that stood in the heart of the state research farm in East Werribee.

“If our parents knew where we were, they would have killed us, if we didn’t kill ourselves,” says Goates, now 78.

Goates grew up on the state research farm, in a cluster of weatherboard cottages that housed generations of agricultural researchers whose innovations ranged from flavoured yoghurt to IVF.

The houses have been demolished, but the silos remain, overlooking hundreds of hectares of mostly fallow fields whose research functions were wound down decades ago.

It wasn’t meant to be this way.

The old state research farm is the largest piece of mostly undeveloped government-owned land in Melbourne, and ever since its demise, successive state governments have eyed its empty paddocks and imagined a glittering outer-western metropolis.

In 2012, then Liberal premier Ted Baillieu declared East Werribee would be “the capital of the new west”, where 50,000 future jobs would be on offer. Daniel Andrews’ Labor government later partnered with Chinese proponents of a $31 billion education city there, but abandoned the proposal in 2019.

The precinct is not empty. The CSIRO and Victoria University both have facilities there, and a large new law and tribunal complex will open next month. But most of the site remains a blank canvas.

Last month, the Victorian government appointed Development Victoria as master developer for East Werribee, in the third attempt to develop the precinct. The agency says the 540-hectare project area will be developed for housing, jobs and community services over the next 30 years.

Goates, still a Werribee resident and now chair of Wyndham community cultural foundation Arts Assist, says there has been “a lot of talk, no action” on East Werribee. She supports renewal, but wants to see the old farm’s remaining heritage-listed buildings better protected.

“I support the idea of job creation,” she says. “We’re already chockers with housing: 330,000 people, and there’s a lack of transport. The developers will tell you, ‘You’re 20 minutes from the city’ – well, that’s absolute bullshit.”

Since plans to urbanise the former farm were first announced, the City of Wyndham’s population has almost doubled, growing from 179,000 to 337,000 people in 13 years, outpacing every other municipality in the state.

State governments and the local council view the farm as the best, perhaps last, opportunity to create a significant white-collar jobs hub in the region.

Detailed labour force data reveals Melbourne’s west has experienced an explosive rise in the size of its professional workforce.

‘It’s more about jobs than housing’

Among Wyndham’s working population, 62 per cent commute outside the municipality for work, travelling on congested freeways, roads and trains.

For those who work in the CBD (more than 41,000 Wyndham-based workers), the average morning commute takes 55.9 minutes, according to the ongoing Victorian integrated survey of travel and activity.

“We have a huge amount of people that leave our municipality every day to go to work, either on a train or in a car,” Wyndham Mayor Mia Shaw says.

“What we want to see are more local jobs for our local economy, and for [Development Victoria] to deliver those 60,000 new jobs so people can live and work in Wyndham, and don’t have to travel.”

The Age is strengthening its focus on Melbourne’s booming west with a special series examining the positives and challenges for the region. On Thursday, our reporters are moderating a West of Melbourne Economic Development Alliance’s (WoMEDA) summit to discuss a vision for the western suburbs’ success.

Development Victoria did not confirm if it had set a target for the number of jobs East Werribee would generate.

“This is a major project that will take time – but it’s an important investment in the future of the west, supporting thousands of local jobs and delivering much-needed housing,” a Victorian government spokesperson said.

The inclusion of new housing in plans for the precinct could be a sticking point for the project’s other proponents.

“For us, it really is more about jobs than housing. We have taken more than our fair share of new housing in this municipality over many years,” Shaw says.

Peter Seamer, the former long-serving chief executive of the Victorian Planning Authority, was a central figure in previous attempts to activate East Werribee.

The easiest thing the government could do is sell the site to housing developers, he says.

“You could sell the land in a millisecond for housing. But what Werribee needs is not more housing; what Werribee needs is decent jobs and offices.”

Seamer says East Werribee will need significant upfront investment if it is to take off, and that ultimately, a government-owned body such as Development Victoria might not be the right entity to deliver this aspect of the project.

Seamer points to Essendon Airport as one of Melbourne’s most successful examples of redeveloping a government-owned asset into an employment hub, and says its renewal happened after the Commonwealth sold the site to wealthy business moguls Lindsay Fox and Max Beck.

”It’s [East Werribee] all zoned appropriately, it’s ready to go,” he says. “It’s government-owned land, but the government’s not going to develop it, so the government’s got to actually get rid of it and let someone get on with it.”

In its new strategic paper, Western Growth: Unlocking Melbourne’s Economic Engine, the West of Melbourne Economic Development Alliance (WoMEDA) argues Wyndham and Melton should be developed into satellite cities by 2050, with plentiful local employment opportunities and good amenity.

Melbourne’s outer west is projected to be home to more than 1 million people by 2050. Wyndham and Melton, which are absorbing more new residents than any other part of the city, should not be left to grow into sprawling dormitories for hundreds of thousands of people who must commute elsewhere for work, the alliance argues.

WoMEDA chair Peter Dawkins says: “The proportion of people who have to leave the area for work is a big issue in Wyndham, and it’s a big issue in Melton as well. We’ve increasingly realised that this isn’t really sustainable.”

In its paper, the alliance has identified East Werribee and Cobblebank as the places most ripe for development into major employment hubs in Wyndham and Melton respectively.

Betting the bank on Cobblebank

Dawkins says the alliance sees “some great green shoots” in Cobblebank that make the suburb a strong candidate for inclusion as a fourth priority precinct for Melbourne’s west, alongside Sunshine, Footscray and East Werribee.

Visitors to the largely undeveloped suburb today would struggle to imagine Cobblebank as the centre of a future satellite city. Most of it is still farmland, interspersed with a few isolated and incomplete housing subdivisions.

A Coles supermarket and a row of eateries stand incongruously among brown paddocks, just north of the construction site for the long-awaited Melton Hospital.

Melton Mayor Steve Abboushi says Cobblebank is about five years away from hitting its stride as a major employment hub for Melton and beyond. A new six-storey community services hub will open by 2027, Kangan Institute TAFE will open in 2028, while the roughly $1 billion Melton Hospital is due to open in 2029. Cobblebank Stadium and the council’s business incubator, Western BACE, have already opened.

“Around 2030 we should start seeing a bustling city full of activity,” Abboushi says.

He is confident the government-led building boom will generate strong private sector interest in Cobblebank. His biggest concern is that industry won’t be able to get there, given the growing strain on Melton’s roads and public transport.

“It’s actually a shame because over 70 per cent of our residents are travelling outside of the city because of a lack of job opportunities, which is putting stress and pressure on public transport, and more traffic on the roads which are already crippled,” Abboushi says.

According to council data, there are 36 jobs for every 100 working people in the City of Melton.

Timing on major transport projects in greater Melton is uncertain: $1 billion in federal funding was committed this year to upgrade the Western Freeway between Caroline Springs and Melton, but with no timeline; electrification of the Melton line has been deferred until some time after the $4 billion Sunshine station upgrade is done.

Pauline Turner has lived in Melton for 16 years, and until recently, had a job that required her to travel into the CBD.

The grinding daily commute didn’t just take time out of her life, it took away her sense of belonging.

“You don’t connect with the people that live around you, so your sense of connection to the place that you live in is actually pretty non-existent,” Turner says.

“Not having that sense of connection really impacts the quality of your life and sense of really belonging somewhere. You just feel like you exist there. You roll your car into the garage, close the door and the only part of the area that you see is your home.”

Turner now counts herself one of the lucky few; she has found a job close to home. It’s given her time in her life to do things she previously couldn’t, such as join the school council at her children’s school.

“It completely changed my life, changed my relationship with my kids,” she says. “I don’t get home at seven o’clock at night, having driven through an hour and a half of city traffic or West Gate traffic to get home, and my whole demeanour is different.”

The West of Melbourne Summit, presented by WoMEDA with The Age, is held on October 22-23. For details go to womeda.com.au

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