High-rise development in city centres results from the public demand of living where they work. As long as city centres keep being developed with offices, corporate centres, banks, entertainment, casinos, shopping-complexes people will want to live closer instead of travelling from the suburbs. Multi-storey apartment developments bring big profits to developers and high income to councils and service providers from payment of rates and services.

I fully appreciate the problems of country road and highway control that is not my area of knowledge being involved predominantly in the planning of city centres, shopping centres, hospitals, and academic campuses.

In the 19th century in England we had the village, the small town, and the development of industrial towns. People lived, worked, and had services provided in their immediate community. People could walk to work or catch a bus, roads and traffic conjestion were not a problem. It is only the expansion of uncontrolled city-development that has created our current problems. I've always maintained that development based on the 19th century model would be the ideal solution in Australia. Given that our major cities are already beyond control I had proposed many times the solution of establishing a central agency for trade of jobs. People with identical occupations or job interests could trade their positions with others so they could work close to home. Unfortunately such a programme would be difficult to implement due to human nature being what it is.

As for population control we're well aware that China had a one-child policy and yet their population kept expanding and their cities kept growing to the point where there is one major center of 32 million people. I recently saw a documentary on that center and we would not like to have their problems.

Aquarius, population stabilisation is incredibly easy in Australia. All we need to do is wind down immigration to net zero over a few years, so that total emigration in a twelve month period becomes the total immigration intake for the following year. Emigration will reduce over a series of years as immigration is reduced until they both stabilise at an equal level.

The immigration factor is then taken out of the population growth equation altogether. And we’d still have a sufficiently high immigration intake to acquire essential skills and a considerably increased humanitarian intake than we currently have.

Then we need to get rid of the despicable baby bonus. And that’s it!

No one-child policy, no coercive laws, not even any disincentives to have kids!

Our fertility will re-establish itself of its own accord at a bit below replacement level, as it was before the disgusting baby-bribe introduced by Keating and promoted and increased by Howard, Costello and Rudd.

Births will still exceed deaths for a couple of decades or more before population growth stops altogether. But I can live with that, as it would be a much slower growth rate than at present and an end to it would be in sight.

This is just so essential for planners to know and appreciate. Again I’ll say that it is just so fundamental to planning, on the national level and at all levels below this.

The key point is: we simply MUST plan for a sustainable future. If we’re not planning for that, then what the hell ARE we planning for?

Planning for continuous growth with no end in sight is just madness.

Perth has got some pretty foul traffic congestion problems, as have all our capital cities. I was caught in a doozy yesterday evening.

And yet it has busses (phoowey to ‘buses’) by the thousands, park-and-ride trains and lots of people commuting by bicycle.

The simple cause of all this congestion is rapid population growth.

With this sort of growth, no amount of urban consolidation or near-CBD high-rise is really going to help very much. The sprawl will continue, just possibly at a slightly slower rate of expansion.

For as long as we have this ridiculous growth, any improvements in public transport, car-pooling, working from home, etc, are just going to be chasing the tail of the negative impacts of this growth, and desperately trying to ease the burden a little bit.

None of this sort of planning is actually going to be real planning that could hope to solve the congestion problems.

And yet, our illustrious decision-making politicians and planners are not going for one second to even dare to think about mitigating this growth, let alone suggesting that it should be wound down so that we can achieve a stable population level for our city!

Crazy stuff!