Ludwig, once a city gets to a certain size then the conventional, incremental options for dealing with growth no longer work. Out come the duplicated bridges, the overhead rail lines and the tunnels which all involve an entire order of magnitude in increased cost. The city itself starts to dwarf its local environment.

But your latest line of logic is in direct contradiction to your initial statements about population growth. You now suggest we should keep on building bigger and bigger cities to capture the economies of scale. So if Sydney is good news at 4 million, why not keep going for 8 million? Of course not, because the diseconomies of scale are already present.

You can't argue for limits on population growth while extolling the benefits of economies of scale. Scale economies provide increased returns for each increase in size of a small unit, and continue for some time, until the unit reaches a size where the benefits of size increases are outweighed by the costs.

So to use your small town example, a standard off the shelf sewerage treatment plant may come in sizes that fit populations of 2000, 10,000 and 30,000. So a town of 4,000 has a fair bit of underutilised capacity and every additional house will spread the overhead costs over more customers. Even if the population doubled, the overhead cost per household will continue to drop.

New states will create more jobs than enlarged local councils because a large proportion of state government overheads are incurred in the capital and this money is taken out of circulation in the regional economy. Form a new regional state capital and the region's share of those overheads will move back to where the taxes were paid. And that money will continue to circulate in the regional economy and create jobs, mostly within a radius of 2 or 3 hours drive from the capital.

A state that is too big will concentrate wealth close to the capital while a state that is too small will not get sufficient economies of scale to outweigh any duplication of functions.

Jennifer, Lack of water for drinking and industry is a good way to keep the population down or stabilised in our greedy ,wastfull "BUY IT,HARDLY USE IT, THEN THROW IT AWAY" society of ours .
All these new dams will directly and indirectly, through allowing increased population, produce ever increasing rates of destruction of the natural environment.
Of particular concern to me, being an occasional fisherman, is the freshwater flows that will be diverted from all the dammed rivers that run to the coast with the supply of fresh water that dilutes the salt and enables the estuary fish to breed and grow .
It is up to all Australians, concerned marine biolgists and fishing groups to demand environmental impact statements that lay out the true cost to the coastal towns,fishing and tourist industries of these proposed dams .

Perseus.

Your post of 11 Sept slipped under the radar. I’ve only just encountered it.

So to continue our debate then…..

“You now suggest we should keep on building bigger and bigger cities to capture the economies of scale.”

Bollocks! It seems as though you need to reread by previous posts! Either that, or just stop claiming that I’m espousing things that you know damn well I’m not.

This is just another example, on the end of a long long line of bizarre interpretations that you have come up with, that are nothing less than diametrically opposed to what I have stated.

“You can't argue for limits on population growth while extolling the benefits of economies of scale.”

What? No, you’ve lost me on that one!

I like the notion of new states, or more specifically, a two-tiered system of government. I started a discussion thread on it http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=29, but not one single person was bloomin well interested!!

I agree that we would get an improvement in governmental efficiency. But I can’t see how new regional governments can improve quality of life for their residents. If they do manage to create more jobs, then a population influx will no doubt result, which will have perhaps predominantly good benefits in some small centres but negative effects in larger centres.

We need to fundamentally change our style of governance. And one of the main ingredients of that is genuine sustainability, and a stable basis for the economy rather than a push to ever-increase it.

So Perseus, what would your ideal state size be, in terms of population or whatever parameters you think are important?