CANBERRA, March 1 (Xinhua) -- Australia is on track to become one of the world's most urbanized countries unless more is done to decentralize the population and invest in regional areas, the head of Infrastructure Australia said on Wednesday.
Population forecasts have shown that two-thirds of all Australians living in four "super cities" -- Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth -- by 2061, something Infrastructure Australia chairman Mark Birrell said was a cause for concern.
Currently, Australia does not have a national population policy, and Birrell said if trends continue, regional areas of Australia could be left behind economically, socially and politically.
"We will all be disappointed in 20 years' time if nearly all of the growth in Australia has occurred in only four cities," Birrell said.
"If we don't watch it, the outcome will be that four cities grow enormously and the share of growth in other centers is disappointingly low."
He said the government last year rejected a proposal from Infrastructure Australia to help reshape the population spread, but something needed to be done to not only ensure that rural Australians aren't left behind, but to make sure the urban population boom is coupled with adequate infrastructure growth.
"If we are going to deal with the likely population growth and also, the pressures of trade growth, it would be in the national interest to see the outcome of that spread across more than just four cities," Birrell said.
Meanwhile former Victorian Planning Minister and current state Opposition Leader, Matthew Guy, said current projections were "totally unsustainable."
"We have got to a situation where more than three-quarters of the state lives in the greater Melbourne area," Guy told News Corp.
"It is totally unsustainable. We have to have this conversation because Victoria is becoming a great, heaving, unsustainable mess. The whole of Victoria is just becoming an offshoot of Melbourne."
