Mr Rudd;
Have you considered asking the people of Sydney, Melbourne and
Brisbane whether they want seven million residents ?

I ask you to read this saying and think about it;

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a
finite world is either a madman or an economist.

I will now mention the politically unmentionable.
Peak Oil ! It is here now, it happened in July 2008.
We will not have the energy required for the plans you have outlined.

Irrespective of what you wish, it will not happen, we cannot supply
the water or food for a vastly increased population.

Which are you, a madman or an economist ?

Cities I think are best capped at 2 million people. I find it strange that Sydney has the same population as all of Queensland. Does not make sense.

There needs also to be a reason to keep land you are not using. North of the tropic of Capricorn how many people?, I am not sure but would say less than 1 million people with lots of summer rain. Again no sense to be headed toward cities of 7 million.

I am sure China is looking at the Eastern section of Russia as they appear to treat as wasteland as their population become more urbanised. Meanwhile China bursts at the seams. If you do concentrate all the population in one area the land will look ready for takeover. Ignore at your peril. Decentralise. If business can use offhsore human resources then they should be able to use regional centres as well.

I hate to say but our cities should have been planned about 50 years ago.

It's pretty obvious why our cities are so gridlocked and unlivable. I will refer to Germany, and most other countries in Europe. Unlike us, they live dispersed in thousands of tiny villages and tiny cities, and connected by a high-speed countryside expressway. You could drive from Hornsby to Newcastle in about 30-40 minutes (the time it takes for most east-Sydney and inner-west residents to drive to the beach).

We on the other hand went for the US/Asian model of compressing all of these places into a single, massive urban sprawl, and as such most of our freeways had to be compromised and turned into street roads- which are slower both because of numerous intersections and traffic lights, and safety reasons.

The only way to fix this is to build major highrises in urban centers, convert highrise work buildings into highrise apartments (most tend to be computer offices, and thus could be replaced by work-at-home employees), and also for the government to draw plans to re-design our freeways- voluntarily buying houses and properties that obstruct the plans and replacing them with lanes, bush or empty space.

In short, you want to further urbanize the urban centers, and get residences AWAY from the freeways so they can be redeveloped into something a little more practical for traffic- and these may include replacing traffic-light crossings with merge lanes, or building a parallel tunnel below the road- or an elevated expressway above it.
This would at least make an improvement of linking the city- and neighbouring cities, closer to the CBD, at least

Instead, we designed our city mostly from country roads, and let whoever build whatever in every space there was. Sadly even our urban centers are built around some of the most nonsensical road systems I've ever seen- so the problem remains.

Kevin Rudd attributes to governments a capacity for knowledge and implementation that has no basis in reason or evidence.

If it is true that government has this superior competence, why only stop at planning? Why not all aspects of the provision of goods and services? Food, water, clothing, friendship, iPods, sex...?

(We can only cringe to imagine how bad sex could be made if providing it was a government responsiblity. We could have the Sexual Planning and Assessment Act, and regulations, the licensing, the compulsory insurances, the appeal tribunals, the redistributionist schemes for social justice for the sexually disadvantaged, the equitable provision of sex policy, supporting a 'deep and productive' market for sex: a bureaucrats' paradise.)

What politicians never mention is that the funding for their social engineering projects will be taken under compulsion from society, and given to a legal monopoly of force.

So, what is there about the original problem, to think that compulsory funding of a monopoly will result in a better outcome than would have obtained from voluntary payment for competing services? Answer: nothing.

Rather than promoting further governmental self-aggrandisement, I wish Kevin would think about what he can do to get government out of our lives, not further into it.

Here's a simple answer, which involves no social engineering, & avoids giving even more control of our lives to this control freak.

It's called decentralisation, but with a difference.

We simply allocate the same percentage of public service to each electorate. In todays world there is no reason to have a great heap of them in Canberra, or Sydney.

Just think of NSW, if we got 45% of the NSW state government wage bill, paid to country people. Sydney might even become liveable again, as population followed the public purse. No forced movement of staff, just the good jobs move. Done over a 15 year time frame, it would not even be too disruptive

Just imagine the change in the ABC, if it's head office was moved to, say Dubbo. QLD health would be a different animal, & much improved, if it's management was moved to Barcaldine.

As the only large employer left in this mechanised world of Oz, government is the only entity that could work decentralisation effectively, & this would bring some equity to those who fund the nation, the people of the regions. So, lets not plan the cities so much as plan the country.

Remember the experiment where they crowded more & more rats, into a fixed space. At a certain level of crowding, they started killing each other, for no obvious reason.

When you look at the behaviour of some of our young folk, on a night out, you have to wonder if, perhaps, we haven't reached that level in some of our cities all ready.

One of the major problems with all infrastructures is that nothing can be built to cope with ‘peak demand periods’ otherwise they would suffer from ‘mass overkill’ during ‘off peak times’.

Take roads, where the vast majority of problems occur during ‘peak hour’.

So, why not offer incentives for ‘off peak travel’, which, if managed effectively, could alleviate the congestion on many of our roads.

Let’s say we implement a system whereby all vehicles pay a sliding rate of toll depending on the time of travel.

At present, they get charged the same rate to cross the gateway bridge at 7 am as they do at 1 am, yet, if say between 10 am and 3pm a discount of 25% was offered and travel between 10pm and 3am was ‘toll free’ many would take advantage of this. Especially heavy vehicles which cause chaos during peak travel times.

Of cause there are always those who have to travel at peak times, but at least the ones who don’t may opt for the alternative.

No matter how many roads or rail links you provide, they will never cope with peak hour travel so it’s time to ‘think outside the square’ and look at ways to better manage what we have, rather than continue expanding which simply encourages more cars, more trips and more convenience