Melbourne's relentless population growth is placing extreme stress on crucial early childhood and health-care services, with fringe growth suburbs bearing the brunt of the pain.
Services such as new maternity hospitals, maternal-and-child-health centres and kindergartens in these areas are not being properly planned for, a report by the auditor-general has found.
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Melbourne's growth comes at a cost
Melbourne is growing faster than any capital city in Australia, but at what cost?
Some key providers so underfunded and behind the times that they rely on faxing to provide data to councils and the Victorian government.
Melbourne will grow from 4.6 million people to more than 6 million by the end of the next decade.
And the city's outer suburbs will soak up 42 per cent of that growth, the report released on Wednesday said.
The report follows earlier research this year that found that Melbourne's outer suburbs were being deprived of up to $250 million a year in basic services such as mental health, disability and physiotherapy as population growth adds record numbers to the city's fringe.
Wednesday's report is the fourth produced by the Auditor-General in the past five years that highlights poor planning by successive Victorian governments, and a failure to properly deal with that rapid population growth.
In the two decades between 2011 and 2031, almost half of Victoria's projected population growth is expected to occur in seven of Melbourne's outer suburban council areas. They are Cardinia, Casey, Hume, Melton, Mitchell, Whittlesea and Wyndham.
Over the same years, the council areas of Melbourne, Maribyrnong, Port Phillip, Stonnington and Yarra – with their well-established infrastructure – will get just 14 per cent of Victoria's population growth.
"There is a high level of uncertainty that birthing, maternal and child health and kindergarten services, and related infrastructure will be provided when and where they are needed in areas of rapid population growth," the report said.
And the report found that no state government agency or council was overseeing how land was to be used in the future to plan for adequate birthing or maternal and child health centres and kindergartens.
It also found there was not enough information being fed back from agencies, centres and kindergartens to properly plan for the future.
"More needs to be done to improve the collection of system-wide information on participation and the reasons for under-participation in maternal and child health centres and kindergarten services," it said.
Neither the education department nor councils had a "robust" understanding of why there was low participation rates in some areas of Melbourne compared to others.
This was because many childhood health centres and kindergartens had no systems to pass on documents such as birth notices issued and received by councils.
The three councils the Auditor-General examined said that there was "no systematic check that the birth notifications they receive, predominantly by facsimile, are correctly recorded in the councils' database".
Nor are kindergartens compelled to take part in the centralised enrolment systems that some councils run.
The report made 11 recommendations including that state and local government agencies better coordinate structure plans for growing areas. These recommendations were largely accepted by government departments, authorities and councils.