Melbourne gaining on Sydney as premier city

SYDNEY - After returning to his hometown of Sydney following almost a year of travelling abroad, 30-year-old Adrian McGruther decided he wanted a change.

On a whim, he convinced his girlfriend to move with him from Australia's largest city to its second-biggest, Melbourne.

The pair have lived there since January and quickly discovered why many say Melbourne is beginning to eclipse Sydney as Australia's "premier" city.

For one thing, housing in Melbourne is cheaper and it has released more land on its fringes for development.

Mr McGruther, who moved from a large law firm in Sydney to work in-house at a music company in Melbourne, said Melbourne's cheaper rents have allowed him and his girlfriend to move into a two-storey inner city apartment with views of the city.

"A house-and-land package on the fringes of Sydney will cost you A$550,000 (S$642,400) to A$600,000, but in Melbourne it's closer to A$400,000," Mr Greville Pabst of the WBP Property Group told The Australian Financial Review earlier this month.

Mr McGruther told The Sunday Times: "The beach is really one of the few things I miss (from Sydney). I love it here."

He is hardly alone in his new-found fondness for Melbourne.

Recent statistics show that the city's population - more than four million people - is booming and will eclipse Sydney's by 2053 or earlier.

Some economists and business groups fault Sydney for failing to focus on planning or investing in transport and housing since a flurry of development in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics.

Meanwhile, Melbourne's more efficient transport network means outer suburbs are better connected to the city.

According to two leading planning experts, Associate Professor Glen Searle and Professor Kevin O'Connor, Melbourne's geography, low housing costs and "European quality" - including its laneways and trams - have proven strong draw cards for both foreign immigrants and Australians moving internally.

"Melbourne's underlying geography is now starting to be an advantage in competition with Sydney," said a report by the pair in December.

"Its less expensive and more-easily developed urban fringe reduces land costs for housing, logistics and other uses... The European quality... has also captured the zeitgeist of Generation Y and helped make it Australia's preferred destination for aspirational young professionals."

But Sydney still has the edge in several areas.

For instance, it still tends to attract more tourists, with 2.8 million international visitors last year compared with 1.8 million to Melbourne.

The gap, however, has been closing, with Melbourne's visitor numbers up more than 60 per cent since 2000, while Sydney's has been stable.

Melbourne is also narrowing the gap in terms of the number of high-value industries hosted, such as financial and professional services.

In 2002, the economic output of Sydney's central business district was 45 per cent larger than Melbourne's. Now the gap is only about 16 per cent, according to analysis by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The rivalry between the two cities even extends to the quality of the food and coffee, which was long regarded as superior in Melbourne. Sydney has begun to catch up, some say.

The gastronomic verdict from Mr McGruther: "The good places in each city are on a par. But in Melbourne, everyone is so coffee-conscious that crappy places don't really survive. I have now become a coffee snob."

Claims to fame 

Sydney and Melbourne are just 700km apart by air and the short one-hour flight is the fifth-busiest airline route in the world. They are Australia's two biggest population centres.

Sydney, with its warmer climate, and famous harbour, was the site of the first British colony.

Melbourne is known for its cultural richness. It has a thriving arts scene and its residents are fanatical about its main sport, Australian Rules Football. It became the first national capital in 1901, but Canberra took over this status in 1927.

Melbourne residents like to note that their city has been ranked as the world's most liveable city by The Economist for the past three years. Sydney residents say they have no such need to brag.

Population: 4.76 million vs 4.35 million

Claim to fame: Beaches and the Opera House vs trams and old arcades

Highest-ranked restaurant in World's Best list: Quay (60th) vs Attica (32nd)

Historic shopping: Queen Victoria Building (1898) vs Queen Victoria Markets (1878)

Most expensive home sale: A$50 million (S$58 million) (estimated) vs A$25 million

Average temperatures in June: 8 to 16 deg C vs 7 to 14 deg C

Olympics host: 2000 vs 1956

Street parking cost in central business district: A$7/hour vs A$5.50/hour 

This article was first published on June 8, 2014.
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