Like the other capitals, new suburbs have sprouted at the city's edges, but the only time all those thousands of new residents pierce the consciousness of most people is when they get jammed in traffic. Their unease grew to alarm when a Treasury report forecast the nation's population to reach 36 million by 2050, and the federal government was urged to act. Last weekend, it caved in to the concern voiced from the cramped cities and booming mining towns, and named Tony Burke the nation's first minister for population. Burke has the unenviable task of focusing government efforts to plan and build infrastructure, and hopefully, herd Australians away from the concentrated coastlines. So far, the debate has raged mainly over immigration, with the opposition coupling the government's skilled migration intake with its supposedly soft refugee policy, in a strategy that should win votes at the election.

Tabart views the sudden political interest wryly. She has long viewed the problem from a different perspective. About 1400 new residents lob into southeast Queensland each week. The more you carve land up into quarter-acre blocks, the more likely you are to stay in power. While the human populous has swelled, the koala population has dwindled.

In 10 years, the foundation says koala numbers have diminished from 25,000 to about 2,000. One would think saving a cute, fluffy creature adored the world over would not be a tough job. But Tabart, who earned a Medal of the Order of Australia for her work, says it is muddied by the interests of developers. "We've been saying population growth has to be looked at forever and ever,'' she said. "But development on the whole east coast of Australia is being driven by Labor governments over the last 10 to 15 years and their absolute desire to keep political power.

"The more you carve land up into quarter-acre blocks, the more likely you are to stay in power.'' Add to the picture the interests of mining and agriculture, and Tabart doubts the government is up to the job of balancing the demands on Australia's precious little useful land. At the other end of the debate, the Australian Urban Taskforce is pleased infrastructure will be better coordinated, or in the words of its chief, "that the federal government put a bullet up the states''. Aaron Gadiel hopes the government won't give in to pressure to cap population, as favoured by prominent Australians like former NSW premier Bob Carr and businessman Dick Smith.| "Any number you come up with and try to project forward is going to be arbitrary,'' he said.

"I'm concerned that the lobbying (for a cap) has already begun by anti-growth campaigners. "I think it's going to be really important to resist that push.'' Besides, he says, those figures that loom large over the debate - 36 million by 2050 - are deceptive. The growth rate of 2.1 per cent growth in 2008/09 falls to 0.9 per cent by the end of the Treasury report's reach in 2049/50, he says. Australians have an average of 1.9 children, and there's nothing out-of-control about that either.

The push to regionalise is a good one, Gadiel says, but as the mining boom has shown, people won't overhaul their lives without the assurance of a well-paid job - tax incentives won't cut it. "You can't move people around Australia like pieces on a chess board,'' he said. "People need to make their own decisions to go, so there are limits to what we can achieve with decentralisation.'' It's early days in Burke's 12-month pet project, and it's not yet clear what his plan will yield. But there won't be a target, and immigration numbers will continue to be reviewed yearly to fit the economic circumstances.

"At the moment you have a two-speed economy across the nation and you have population movements which don't necessarily match that,'' Burke told reporters on Thursday. So far it seems Burke's portfolio would be better described as "population dispersal'' rather than "population''. But if the government doesn't grab this chance to ensure future Australians will have the quality of life we enjoy now, it will be an opportunity, as Deborah Tabart might say, wasted. AAP