Imagine travelling back to 1945 and telling an Australian that the country’s population would almost quadruple over the next 80 years.

Australia was home to just over seven million people at the end of the Second World War. Today, the national population count sits four times higher at 28 million.

Our postwar Australian would have stared at us in disbelief: “So much growth. You must have built so many new cities. New ports, universities, railway lines, and industrial centres must stretch across the country. Surely the Australian population is spread across a much wider network of large cities than it is today.”

“Not quite, mate. We squeezed most of the additional 21 million people into the same five cities that dominate Australia today in 1945.”

Today, roughly two-thirds of Australians live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. By that measure, Australia has the most concentrated settlement pattern in the world (ignoring city states like Singapore).

The Gold Coast is the great postwar exception. It is the only new major city. It grew from a collection of coastal settlements into a genuine metropolitan economy with around three-quarters of a million residents. It has its own employment base, universities, hospitals, tourism economy and urban identity.

The Gold Coast wasn’t technically a planned city. But allowing it to grow into a major urban centre was one of the smartest things Australia did during the postwar population boom. We should have built six Gold Coasts.

Instead, we added suburb after suburb to the edges of our existing capitals. Sydney and Melbourne spread across vast distances. Infrastructure struggled to keep up. Commutes became longer and longer. Well-located land near the office towers became scarce and extraordinarily expensive. This history lesson matters because Australia is likely to keep growing.

Nobody can say precisely when Australia will double and reach 56 million people. Fertility, migration, life expectancy, economics and politics will all influence the trajectory.

The exact year matters less than the direction of travel. Australia remains prosperous, safe and politically stable in a region containing billions of people. We use migration to fill skills shortages, support growth and soften the fiscal impact of ageing.

Continued population growth remains the most likely long-term scenario. Not planning for that scenario is irresponsible.

We should ask a straightforward question now: Where will the next 28 million Australians live?

Right now, we don’t have a serious answer.

Governments release population projections but rarely connect them to a national settlement strategy. Housing, transport, water, universities, employment and migration are debated as separate policy areas.

When population growth arrives, we respond by rezoning another patch of land on the fringe of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane. We build the houses first and spend the following decades trying........

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