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.