Kevin Rudd has revived his controversial 2009 push for a “big Australia”, saying neither maximum workforce participation nor productivity growth alone will generate an economy large enough and a workforce young enough to pay for the country’s future.

The former Labor prime minister has re-entered the domestic political debate in an election year, using a new wide ranging essay called The Complacent Country to outline thoughts on identity, population, values, the influence and “unapologetic bias” of the Murdoch media, the deficiencies of the “faux left”, and to assess Australia’s place in the world.

Rudd says in the absence of continuing significant migration flows, “who on earth is going to fund our most fundamental future national needs, from health and aged care, to retirement incomes to national defence in an increasingly unstable region”.

“We run the risk of being a young country which becomes old before its time. These are the seeds of national decline.”

The former prime minister’s intervention cuts sharply across the tone of the current political debate in Australia, with the Morrison government telegraphing a reduction in immigration, and policies encouraging migrants to settle outside Sydney and Melbourne.

Labor has called on the government to develop a joint population policy, but Bill Shorten has not yet said whether he favours a cut in the immigration rate.

While Rudd excoriates Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton in the essay, and the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull also cops a serve, derided at one point as “little more than Tony Abbott with manners” – the former prime minister says his ideas are not intended as an implicit rebuke of Shorten.

Rudd says his new manifesto is not also intended as a “prescription for what Labor should do if it forms the next government of Australia”.

“That is a matter for the parliamentary party to determine. Rather this is an attempt by a private citizen to encourage a genuine national debate on the big, existential questions facing our nation’s future.”

There is a perverse psychology at play on the part of a number progressive commentators

On population, he contends Australia will not be able to sustain its future standard of living and meet emerging social policy and national security policy needs in the absence of a “much larger population”, and adds the imperative is “to plan effectively for an optimum population size”.

He says infrastructure will need to keep pace with the rate of population growth, and also floats a “new type of nation building bond” to help fund projects, such as high speed rail between the capital cities, “otherwise we will be full of plans but with limited finance to give them effect, and our growth potential will be strangled as a result”.

Rudd addresses questions about sustainability by saying Australia must transform itself “over time” into a zero-carbon economy.

While Labor has walked away from an economy-wide carbon price in favour of policies driving abatement in specific sectors, Rudd says “we need a globally competitive carbon price set through the market mechanism of an emissions trading scheme”.

He also says the existing renewable energy target should be maintained.

Rudd also spends a portion of the essay restating recent, strongly worded criticisms he has made about the political influence of the Murdoch media, but the ABC also cops a serve for being “so terrified of funding cuts from the conservatives that they will bend over backwards to attack Labor in order to be seen by the Liberals as ‘balanced’, comfortable in their cynical assumption that a Labor incumbency would never cut their funding, but only enhance it”.

The purpose of the media critique is to argue the difficulties of prosecuting a centrist agenda in Australian politics. He says being a mainstream progressive party “be a lonely business” because parties such as Labor are vilified by the right and cannibalised by the left, “who, almost literally, prefer to eat their own”.

In an excoriation of what he terms the “chic left”, Rudd says “there is nothing that the putative left-wing commentariat enjoy more than ripping a Labor party or Labor government apart for failing to live up to the high ideals of the progressive political cause, or at least as selectively defined by self-same commentariat”.

“Indeed, there is a perverse psychology at play on the part of a number progressive commentators which compels them to demonstrate that they, the progressive commentariat alone, are pure, whereas those in the progressive political class, are all fallen,” he says.

“This is part of a wider psychosis on the part of the arm-chair left that always prefers to eat its own, rather than attack the conservatives.

“In this ‘chic-left’ view of the world, Labor governments must deliver a 100% progressive reform agenda because, after all, Labor is supposed to believe in these things. Whereas from the comfort of the arm-chair’s recline, it’s assumed that because the conservatives have never believed in the progressive cause, what’s the point in ripping into them?”

In relation to the influence of Murdoch, Rudd declares Labor needs to understand it is in a “war” with News Corporation.

“We should be loud and proud and declare open warfare on Murdoch and all that he stands for through all the alternative media at our collective disposal.

“In fact, we are wimps if we don’t. The truth is Murdoch seeks to destroy our reputation as a party, as a movement and as a body of progressive ideas. We are perfectly entitled, based on the facts alone, to go on the attack. We are in a war against Murdoch.”