http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/3101.0Main+Features1Mar%202009?OpenDocument

or (this is same, but less likely to have been mangled) http://preview.tinyurl.com/yarqktj

Observe the mostly flat (grey) line representing natural growth, compared to the dashed line representing oversees migration.

Yes, it is all of those things. Particularly when compared to Sydney.

Ned, I’ve read that the state of the art in planning has now moved on from the fashion of “organic” suburban streets designed to increase the distance between any two points about tenfold, and strict zoning that turns every shopping strip into either a Westfield-in-waiting or a white elephant. What can you tell us about the next generation of towns?

And what do women want? Since, as I argued above, it’s all for nothing if women don’t like these towns enough to move into them.

When you fix the coastal fringe and ribbon development including below high tide mark then you may start on the satellite cities. Not before. Priorities, fellow, priorities.

On further reflection, any help you can offer by way of setting aside meaningful transport corridors in growth areas would be much appreciated. With room for cycles, trains, buses and the odd car or three.

Maybe I can answer that question. As someone who has just completed their 3rd year of a planning degree, I can certainly say that there are some who are ignorant. However, the fast majority are aware of the issues discussed above, and are passionate about trying to provide solutions to the various problem we face as a country. Lets just hope the idealism doesn’t get beaten out of us when we graduate.

The ones we have at present are either corrupt or ignorant. Or both.

And please stop telling me that an architect can solve the problems. Anybody remember a bloke called Burley Griffin? And Canberra is economical, well designed and comfortable? For sheep, perhaps.

The other day I wrote in a letter highlighting research on the potential to transform Australia’s soils into carbon sinks and revive Australian farming. This is the sort of thing that Turnbull was pressing for in his amendments to Labor’s CPRS. Labor weren’t going to give farmers credits for terrestrial sequestration, but now they will.

At the same time I sent a letter to the Wentworth Group asking if these measures also might lead to an increase Australia’s rainfall. The short answer is yes, eventually. The long answer is printed below.
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Dear James,
Thanks for the email and your feedback. I have forwarded it to our Director for his information.
You are quite right that there has been work linking vegetation with regional rainfall. Clive McAlpine has done some retrospective work on this (I have attached a few papers but there would be more).
The two processes (water sucked up by forests) and increased rainfall from restored vegetation would occur, as you say, at different time scales, with the former being an immediate problem and the latter being a gradual process. Any immediate losses in water availability have to be managed now, although the prospect of increasing rainfall sure is an encouraging one. Unfortunately, regardless we are still heavily under the influence of the El Nino cycle and ultimately global climatic shifts, which is also another good reason to restore vegetation – we need our landscape to be resilient and capable of adaptation.
Thanks again for your email. Hope the papers help.
Kind regards,
Jane

Global warming means that this continent will be able to sustain a far smaller population than hitherto. The green east of Oz will be no more. I don’t know how quickly it will happen, but the collapse in food production and water supplies will probably happen sooner than many people expect. Large parts of our traditional farmlands have been in more or less permanent drought in this decade, and are unlikely to improve. In the last week I read somewhere that the Lachlan has dried up, threatening the water supplies to several large inland towns in NSW. The Darling has been dead for years. Snow will disappear from the snowies, and flows in the Murray will decline to a dribble.

The US has far more inland rivers than Oz. Las Vegas, in its current form, exists because of the Hoover dam and the once plentiful water of the Colorado river. (In this decade water flows in the Colorado river have declined substantially and are continuing to decline.) Ph0enix was built in the Salt River Valley and is supplied by dams built nearby.

We might conceivably pump water from the north to our southern towns, using solar powered pumps, as suggested. It is more likely that we will produce enough drinking water for our population through de-salination and massive energy use. Local food production will decline, so we may have to transport food from elsewhere - probably from countries that are unable to feed their own populations.

Whatever plans are made for new population centers, the bulk will move to areas around the existing population centers and the overcrowding will be a thing of nightmare.

The future looks pretty bleak to me, and the idea of calmly proposing an increase in our population to 35 million seems staggeringly disconnected from any sense of reality.

Women, it seems to me, lead modern population movements. When enough young women left the country towns in the 1980s, that was the writing on the wall for rural Australia. The collapse of the global wool market soon followed, Australia’s grain exports started to come under attack from the US and Europe, and then came the drought. Men started heading for the cities because the alternative was a single life. When the women leave town, it’s time to sell your house.

It was uncanny. I can’t explain it. I have no mystical faith in women’s intuition, it’s just a pattern I’ve noticed. Today, the hot spots for residential investment are almost all demographically overweight with young women. If you want a tip for picking the next winning suburb, look for a recent change in those age and sex demographics which isn’t yet reflected in the prices.

Most of the regional centres have lost their industrial reasons for being. The farms struggle to make a profit and they get bigger, lowering the population density. Manufacturing towns like Lithgow are just weekend getaways now. Men will go where the work is, even if that means living in a corrugated iron streetscape with a converted shipping container for a pub. But they won’t stay for long and they won’t build anything if there’s no one to share it with but a bunch of footy mates coming around for pizzas and dirty videos.

So I think if we want to induce population movement we’ve got to do it the reverse of the 19th century way and start with the finer things. Gardens, art schools, music, walkability factor, social hubs, bookshops, waterlilies … Women have taste, and taste has to be the central consideration in these designs. Or we’ll be leading a horse to rancid water.

As long as the people who think it’s a good idea move there.

Not me of course, everyone else.

Guy, in theory it could be done. But who would pick the architects? The same people that renamed Darling Harbour as Bagakangaroo, er, Barbarossa, er, Barbar- … whatever?