Sorry Paul, I disagree strongly.

< On a visionary and high strategic level, however, there is widespread national and international support for the direction Australia is taking – a direction that is also supported by the people of Australia. >

Really?

The majority of Australians support very high immigration and hence population growth with no end in sight, do they?

The majority of us can’t see the absolutely glaring contradiction between rapid population growth and attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, arrest environmental destruction and fix problems such as congested roads and all manner of other overloaded infrastructure and services, can’t we?

We can’t see that an ever-bigger population is driving ever more rapid exploitation of our primary natural resources in order to achieve an ever-bigger economic turnover… in order to just stay still in terms of quality of life, can’t we?

Ordinary Australians can see this, and so can anyone around the world with a modicum of common sense.

The day we start planning for a sustainable society with a stable population will be the day that your tenet that Australia shows international leadership in global changes might actually start to have an inkling of credibility.

22 million for the size of AU is hardly enormous, most crowd around city's that is a problem. The NBN will ease a percentage of that. We need city's, in the more remote areas.

Australia shows international leadership in global changes!
I think the author has been reading government propagands. Most of the time it looks like either Grandstanding or 'The blind leading the blind'.
The previous comment about 22 million in an island the size of Australia is simplistic in the extreme. What sort of population distribution is envisaged in the desert and other regions?

I agree however with the disagreement about large population intake. Look what happened after a 10 year El Nino and some areas had virtually NO FRESH WATER and the Queensland Labour Government had to set up the iniquitous Water Grid for SE Queensland, the Desalination Plant (currently mothballed) for the Gold Coast, the debacle about Water Buy-Back for the Murry Darling Irrigation area at the Federal Level.

We should be encouraging Skilled Immigrants to replace the aging population and skills shortage, not opening our doors to people who are only going to further increase the dependency on Govenment Handouts.

I could go on!

Whatever beverage the author imbibed before writing this account, it appears to have clouded his thinking and distorted his logic.

With regard to the Kyoto Protocol and the carbon tax, history will show that Australia has acted irrationally, as there is no scientific or economic justification for those actions. There is no scientific evidence that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause dangerous global warming. Like many supposed learned people, he has been conned by the IPCC's pseudo-science. Unless there is scientific justification, it makes absolutely no economic sense to replace efficient coal-fired power with renewable energy that is at least three times more expensive.

Given his supposed telecommunications expertise, it is surprising that he has accepted the Government's intervention by way of enforcing its very expensive national broadband network on the Australian people, without carrying out a cost-benefit analysis. A cost-benefit analysis would have exposed the NBN as uneconomic. The indications are that we will finish up with the most expensive internet services in the developed world. Some benefit!!

This is utter rubbish.We are going backwards in terms of democracy and peronal freedoms.Gillard," There will be no carbon tax under the Govt I lead."

"Some of the bold initiatives that Australia has taken over the last few years are in general supported by its people. Look at the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, our leadership at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009,... and the carbon tax. We might squabble over the details, but citizens intuitively see all of these issues as important, visionary and of strategic importance to the country."

"Being utterly opposed to" and "squabbling over the details" -- it's the first time I've ever heard those used as synonyms. But I guess 'catastrophically stupid' counts as 'important' and 'of strategic importance' (TWICE as important?). 'Visionary', not so much: if our fearless leaders could have foreseen the defeat at Copenhagen, the rout at Cancun and the forthcoming bear-pit at Durban, not to mention their own electoral collapse, methinks they would have tiptoed quietly away from the whole schemozzle.