The way I see it, we keep asking the wrong question. It’s not about how many people live here, or where they come from. It’s about where we’ll all live. I’m keen to see decentralisation and smart cities thinking on the public and political agendas. That means looking at how the smart use of new technology can make it feasible for people to move out of overcrowded capital cities, voluntarily of course.
It also means encouraging businesses to relocate so that they, too, enjoy the lower costs of operating in regional centres. http://theluckygeneral.biz/2018/07/29/its-not-about-the-size-of-the-population-its-about-where-were-all-going-to-live/

Like everything, there has to be a plan. We cannot continue as before, crowding ten million into cities with infrastructure designed for around a million?

Nor can we just spread the excess growth into regions that have even fewer natural resources.

And if we sell most of our food production and energy resources, in some myopically short-sighted attempt to maintain a halfway decent standard of living for around half of us? All we can really achieve is growing social disunity and at a time when social cohesion has never been more important!

We need reform of our energy market ( MSR thorium) and tax reform!

Moreover, need to think decentralisation ahead of ever-increasing congestion in our larger and increasingly dysfunctional cities! Rapid rail and fibre to the home NBN!

We need to reform the tax system to remove for once and for all time all quite massive tax evasion by the biggest players first and foremost And doable only with a flat rate tax system that's unavoidable that everyone above the threshold pays.

15 % flat with no deductions is both fair and equitable? And gives back former tax compliance spending! [around 7%.] Meaning an adjusted effective tax rate of just 8%! even as revenue is quite massively increased.

After that spending needs to be reigned in so it serves the nation rather than empire building bureaucrats?

And done by the legislated removal of the only tier of government actually made redundant by modernisation? State legislatures! And made more than double by increased/maximised regional autonomy and needs based, means-tested direct funding, wherever possible,i.e., education and health?

After that, we need our century's snowy mountains project. And that is to introduce endless water to the dead heart and make it bloom. Via a man-made dual lane canal from the gulf to lake Eyrie?

That's how you plan for a bigger Australia?
Alan B

Addendum, The planned conversion of our economy to one based almost exclusively on super-inclusive cooperative capitalism is the only prospect in train, that includes growing social cohesion and our foreign investment paradigm ought to be based almost exclusively on the sale of self-terminating, tax-free, government guaranteed, thirty-year bonds.

Now that unprecedented prosperity in prospect along with properly planned population and prosperity growth is the only plan that has a snowflakes chance in hell!? If you ask me.

And not available with the current parliament of baboons currently in charge of the asylum.
Because those dart throwers cannot look past the next three years or the impending, win at all costs, election cycle.

And because this is so? We are doomed to become a debt-riddled banana republic with lots of holes in barren ground? That where we are logically headed without a cohesive plan for a bigger Australia, in my humble view.
Alan B.

As no one else is concerned about the mix up of comments (shows how unaware most of you are), here’s my pennyworth on population.

Today’s population is not “projected” ; it is what it is today.

539,500 extra, unneeded people were allowed into Australia this past year. There were at least 750,000 unemployed Australians here, and you poor buggers still working wonder why your wages have stagnated! I wonder how many of the half million plus new arrivals had jobs to go to?

“Others have suggested that a population size of 15 million is more suitable”? No, the optimum population has always been 13 million, and it still is.

Only yesterday in the MSM it was predicted that Australia will soon be unable to grow enough food for itself. If a wall was put around the country today, we might manage to feed ourselves, although we are already importing food.

We also have to import nutrients for our ancient, impoverished soil, which is badly lacking in phosphorus.

We do not need a high falutin plan for immigration. We need to stop all immigration for the foreseeable future, and employers need to start training workers and stop lobbying government to bring in cheap imports trained by someone else in other countries.

Populate AND perish.

Ttbn I must take issue with you, we in fact grow literally millions of tonnes of grains, pulses, vegetables and fruit, we will not be ever short of food. I wonder if all the lying rent seekers from the AGW scam allow this carbon to be counted as a renewable? I bet they don't!
I think 13 million population is too low but we really should investigate but who can do this? Certainly not the dicks who spruik AGW and do not count he millions of tonnes of agriculture we grow. It has to be us and I will say when the brakes are put on immigration we will drop into a recession. No politician will ever say again "The recession we had to have",
What to do? I am open to others opinions.

First things first, Produce the world's lowest costing industrial dispatchable power and that leaves many high tech energy dependant companies with little other choice than relocate here, Add to that, an effective tax rate of just 8% and they crush each other in the queue.

Then we could add in medical tourism as sick kids and other cancer suffers sort cancer miracle cure bismuth 213. And no reason why these day clinics need to be located in even a major city, just close to a strategically located, molten salt thorium reactor MSR!

Low power prices and a competitive, single, stand-alone tax system would encourage droves of cashed-up self-funded retirees to relocate here.

Bringing with them an increased demand for services, mostly unskilled? Gardening/housework etc. And as they did, reduce the unskilled unemployed, many of who would go from job start where the taxpayer-supported them, to earning their own and contributing to the tax revenue base?

And a win-win all around. Self-funded retirees don't add to the demand for public schools or public hospitals but boost private practise hospitals and clinics. A win-win that sees their assets eventually transferred to other less fortunate Aussies?

It's so easy for the perpetual whingers to moan about new chums taking their jobs without ever even once contributing a positive win-win idea to the debate. With the only thing these drongos can think of or offer is reduced migration That's all!

No positive idea that allows we Aussies to extract an advantage in win-win outcomes. And where a new idea, would be a novel new experience!

But an expert at bagging the creativity of others!

Then wonder why the joint is going backwards at a rate of knots while our debt levels, domestic, foreign and government, surge!
Alan B.

ttbn: Human effluent is loaded to the gunnels with phosphorous and we pump millions of annual tons out to sea every year in a drought-ravaged country! Along with literally millions of litres of precious water!

Then import expensive fully imported nutrients for phosphorous deficient soil!

And overseen by the dart throwing parliament of Baboons who have either allowed or somehow personally benefitted from this blatant absurdity?

And arguably because they're focused exclusively on the daily episode of the political bun fight that dominates ahead of bipartisan pragmatism?

Why?

Because that's along with vested and or personal interest, what takes precedence!?

And the national interest comes a distant fourth?

Like most of what we use, just a waste creating a paradigm that serves very few!

We can do so much better!

And if we don't then the results for Longman will be the everyday reality for those who designed and created the obscenity, we call, a divided and dismembered, modern Australia?
Alan B.

Electricity supply is one of the obstacles, that is affordable and reliable.

This article denounces the industry stating the wind turbines will last 20 to 25 years.

https://stopthesethings.com/?s=lucky+to+last+10+Years

Dr Gordon Hughes is a Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh and a while back produced this cracking study which destroyed yet another wind industry myth about the longevity of their giant fans: windfarm peformance UK hughes.19.12.12.

Instead of the much touted 25 years, the output from modern turbines starts to drop significantly after about 8 – and they’re well and truly ready for the scrapheap by the time they hit their teens. Here’s a story on Dr Hughe’s findings by The Courier.

By 10 years of age, the report found that the contribution of an average UK windfarm towards meeting electricity demand had declined by a third.

That reduction in performance leads the study team to believe that it will be uneconomic to operate windfarms for more than 12 to 15 years — at odds with industry predictions of a 20- to 25-year lifespan.

They may then have to be replaced with new machinery — a finding that the foundation believes has profound consequences for investors and government alike.

Down the page are 2 pics of windfarms now useless and another problem is.
The company that wind power outfits use to hold the land holder agreements with farmers is usually a $2 company with no real assets and, therefore, the “promise” contained in those agreements to decommission turbines isn’t worth the paper it’s written on: the parent company will simply let the company with the land holder agreement be wound up in insolvency; and host farmers were too gullible to obtain decommissioning bonds to ensure the clean-up costs are covered. And planning authorities were just as stupid – they could have easily forced developers to provide decommissioning bonds as a condition of granting planning consent, but generally failed to do so.

Above should be.

http://stopthesethings.com/?s=lucky+to+last+10+Years

Rent-Seeker’s Nirvana: Ultra-Rich Pocket $Billions in Wind & Solar Subsidies at Our Expense.

http://stopthesethings.com/2018/07/29/rent-seekers-nirvana-ultra-rich-pocket-billions-in-wind-solar-subsidies-at-our-expense/

The hundreds of $billions paid in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar constitute the largest wealth transfer in economic history.

In Australia, the Federal Government’s Large-Scale RET gouges $60 billion from power consumers over the life of the scam, and redirects it to such worthy outfits as AGL and our favourite whipping boys, Infigen. In the history of the Commonwealth, no other single industry subsidy scheme comes anywhere near it in value.

When motor manufacturers, General Motors Holden and Toyota put their hands out for a measly $500 million to maintain their Australian operations, then PM, Tony Abbott told them would “not chase them down the road waving a blank cheque at them“.

A mere half $billion would have saved something like 20 or 30,000 jobs across the sector.

At present, the combined subsidies to wind and solar exceed $4 billion a year, and the number of permanent jobs generated is completely trivial; the instant the subsidies go, so do the jobs briefly ‘created’: Cut the Subsidies and ‘Green’ Jobs Instantly Vanish: 80,000 German Solar Workers Sacked

There is absolutely no economic benefit in having power generated by wind and solar; delivering power at crazy random intervals, rather than when power consumers actually need it, results in a product with absolutely no commercial value. And that’s the reason that – in the absence of guaranteed Feed in Tariffs, renewable energy certificates and government underwritten contracts – power generated by nature’s wonder fuels wouldn’t find a market, anywhere, anytime, ever.

It's hard to believe that 43 years have passed since the last act of common sense was enacted in Australia.

JBowyer,

Take issue with the source of the information, not with me if you think you know more.

Phillip S

Very interesting. The most compact and comprehensive account of the disaster renewable energy has become. Thank you!

Get Bradfield schemes up & running asap to take the pressure off the coast & make the arid interior habitable with rail lines to match. Forget about Long Haul trucking, they could be put on the railway & taken to where they & their cargo are needed. Save time, fuel & emission.
It would be a multiple plus for any Government that has the gonads to tell the Greens to go back to school & let people who know plan the implementing of the schemes. People who live in those areas must be involved not those insipids with their BA from the suburbs. Add to this a national service & before you can finish your baked beans on toast, we'd have an Australia full of go & purpose.
Several 100,000+ towns could be settled around Lake Eyre alone if the water level remained steady. Same goes for around Lake Argyle & there are literally hundreds of places similarly suitable. All it requires is common sense & patient investors not those who want their profits on the same day the schemes start.
In a word, Australians need to wake up, shake off the dreadful policies that hold us back presently & curb their selfishness. There is so much employment & quality of life just waiting for Australians to change by listening to people who know.

An important issue like this one & only a handful of concerned citizens bothered to contribute is a very sad indictment indeed on the priorities of people living in this Nation.
Perhaps the author should have included Sport & Pop music to entice more people to become concerned ?