“In planning the future of our country, it is time to develop a national settlement strategy to balance the economic imperatives of treasuries with the human and environmental imperatives of the community,” Mr Stokes writes in an opinion piece published in Monday’s Herald.

Mr Stokes, who will expand on his views in an address to The Sydney Morning Herald's Population Summit on Monday, observes that predictions about population growth in Sydney and NSW are almost always wrong, mostly because they cannot anticipate federal immigration policies.

“What is clear is that decisions by the federal government about immigration have profound impacts on the size and distribution of population that the states are left to plan for - without knowing how many people will rely on public services into the future,” Mr Stokes writes.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, along with his state counterparts, have said they would work towards a national population framework by the end of the year. While Mr Stokes said this was heartening, he also suggested treasurers and treasuries should not have exclusive carriage of the issue.

“From a treasury perspective, population growth is just another term for economic productivity. Strategic planning takes a broader view of the complexity of human settlements, so that the economy exists to serve the population, rather than the population being increased to serve the economy,” Mr Stokes writes.