Decentralisation - Is gameplay for election cycles. We have lived and experienced demise of small country environments. These regional centre's are hubs for trainee & apreticeships forming tomorrows expertise other than 457visa's. our relocation dominated by centralisation.

Absolutely right Mickijo

And for as long as we worship gross economic growth instead of average per-capita economic growth, the situation is unlikely to improve. For all our ‘healthy’ economic growth figures over the last decade or more (since the last recession), average per-capita economic growth, in real inflation-adjusted terms, has declined and most services have declined along with it.

There is no indication that things would be any different in new cities or population-boosted towns under a program of decentralisation.

One thing that really amazes me is the lack of outcry from the community about the obvious decline in so many of our services – water-provision, health, education, in fact just about everything, despite the ‘Costelloesque’ positivity about the economy. Can’t people see that they are just plain being duped by our illustrious leaders, with the constant message that we’ve got to have growth and that faster growth is better? Can’t they see that the sort of growth that we are getting is not getting us anywhere?

Can’t good thinking people in positions of influence such as Lyn Allison see this…. and see fit to push for a limit to the absurd self-defeating type of growth that we are getting via high immigration and the push for a higher birthrate, and a constantly greater GDP? ….so that the good-science and good-development type of growth actually has a chance of winning us a better quality of life, or at least slowing the decline?

Again, I express real anger and great sadness that Lyn has seen fit to advocate something like decentralisation as a total solution, while not even mentioning anything to do with continuous growth.

If we are going to follow our politicians and sweep unwanted difficulties under the carpet - yes, just where will we put our prospective urban centres?
With the present rate of "progress?" we need to accommodate a million shiny new citizens every four years. Then, for decentralisation, a Canbera-sized place will be required each year for three years; followed by maybe a breather for a year. That will be the pattern to eternity; because it is deemed impossible to change our present outlook.
Plonk another Canberra anywhere along the east coast - any one year let alone every year; and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth from the present residents who consider their once-attractive pads already overcrowded.
Put them anywhere along the Darling or the Murray or near their feeder streams, and there will be frosty reception from those people already dependent on those rivers' system.
Maybe build them on stilts along that old seabed, the plains of western Queensland where the rivers don't run often - but when they do they run too wide for the comfort of cities that size.
There are many other choices, but are those any better? It would be interesting to hear of adequately considered sites, and why. But I do not expect such consideration to be given - especially when carefully assembled data on society's choices have been so studiously avoided since 1994. But maybe Lyn Allison will prove me wrong. I wonder; in hope, not expectation.

Am glad to see that the topic has had a constructive response. The burying of issues of 'nation building' and rational resource use involving environment, decentralisation and population issues as preconditions for immigration increase (or not ) and development is a measure of how much say Australians have in their own futures has been lost, in the last twenty years.
Consequently we witness travesties like the rape of Tasmanian rainforests, with all the lies that have gone with that. And meanness toward indigenes.
The planning issues used to have a home with the ALP, but like the Howardists they have become infatuated with neo liberalist property-rights obsessions and ideology, "reform", "competition" and "efficiencies" all bespeaking of surrender to, rather than management of, globalisation and change.

I have used the phrase before,'Progress can be likened to a dog chasing it's own tail'.
More and more needs exactly that. There may be profit in it but there is very little gain.
We once had lots of bustling little townships, then the banks decided profit was not high enough and pulled out followed by staff and so the towns began to shrink bit by bit.
Now there is a turn around and little towns, particularly those near the coast, are expanding. Even the smaller places are filling up but where is the industry to sustain them?
Our industries have been sent offshore to take advantage of cheaper wages while we depend on selling ore.
Asian nations are waxing fat while our young people are going untrained . What is going to maintain the larger population in the future if the ore and gas give out. "Who cares!" say the politicians,"We are OK Jack!"
We do not have visionaries in parliament.

"water is not a limiting factor if every new house has a decent sized water tank and storm runoff is captured for parks and industry"

If this is what you think, then you havent tried living in a low rainfall area. My family hails from a region with an average rainfall of 15 inches a year (that's 375mm for those that prefer the new system). Our 6 bedroom, 2 loungeroom house collects water into 3 large tanks. The shearing shed and machinery sheds also collect into another 2 large tanks. This rain that is collected is enough to get by (so long as we dont water the garden), as we have a twin tub washing machine (and use only 1 lot of water for washing and 1 lot for rinsing), and all share the same bathwater (no shower has ever been installed because they use too much water). In 100 years we have never run out of water, but we are mightly stingy with it. I would suggest that if you are looking to build an American-style population spread, you would have to go far outside the belts in which 1 decent-sized tank would suffice for water supplies.