The Labor member for the Electorate of Wills in Victoria, Kelvin Thomson, yesterday reinforced his arguments for reducing immigration into Australia.

The basis of his argument has three parts:  increase our refugee intake, decrease our skilled migrant intake and avoid major problems caused by the overcrowding of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

First of all, I don‘t think it is smart to reduce skilled labour immigration in the future.  We will need more, not less, people who wish to be part of our ideals and philosophies and pay their taxes on the way through. These people should be encouraged to come to our nation.

I do agree, however, with Mr Thomson’s assertion that if we keep putting all immigrants into the major capital cities we will create problems for ourselves.  Australia must start moving its people into new areas and this does not mean the outer suburbs. 

It is easier to develop a green field sight for sewage, power, roads and public transport than it is to pull up established infrastructure, that was quite operational but had gone beyond its capacity and replace it with larger infrastructure. In due course that infrastructure will have to be replaced because it, too, will become inadequate. 

In a developed area, the replacement of infrastructure creates huge dislocations and inconveniences for the people of the suburbs. It is also incredibly expensive for the taxpayer.

With the Henry Review a-foot, dealing with taxation, we must come up with the mechanisms to inspire people to move to new areas of our nation and inspire investment of capital infrastructure in new areas, so that we do not destroy the lifestyle and capacity of the capital cities.

I don’t believe that the doubling of the population of Brisbane, and the effect that this will have on the long term future of the coastal strip between Noosa and Byron Bay, is a good thing.

I don’t know how many more tunnels we can build in Sydney, so that the traffic avoids the C.B.D. before we come to an epiphany that we have too many people to handle in one metropolitan paddock.  If we could just encourage some of the cars to live elsewhere such as Dubbo, Sydney would be a better place.

It is only a matter of time before Melbourne grows to a level where the standard of living for every new person who comes to the city will incrementally decrease the standard of living for all those who are there.

With a combination of infrastructure such as inland rail, water infrastructure, road development,  zonal taxation,  airport expansion at regional hubs as opposed to Badgerys Creek or new runways at Mascot, we can not only develop the inland but alleviate the problem apparent every morning at peak hour in the capital cities.

It is interesting to see in the prospective development in the Galilee Basin around Alpha, in Central West Queensland, that we are about to move 20,000 mega litres of water per year via a pipeline from the Burdekin Dam, 200kms away on the coast.  So we can do big things when the desire is there.

What the nation needs is a government that really does have a vision for the future, beyond ceiling insulation, school halls and plasma screens.