I'm due to go to Brisbane this weekend for work. It is an attractive city, but another capitol city where the car is dominant and the emphasis is on building freeways to improve traffic flows.

This is a state when a variety of State Governments have been seduced all along by the mantra of development and growth above everything else and their regional plans are all about helping to make this happen.

It is in south-east Queensland where the coastal landscape has been aggressively developed and little green space has been retained. So what we have developing is a 200 kilometre city. In this urban world the signs point to the challenge of rapid population growth with an updateding of the infrastructure plan: its all about roads and more roads, more electricity infrastructure, a new hospital for the Gold Coast, a couple of small dams, and nothing at all to preserve the environment. If South-east Queensland is growing even faster than many demographers predict, then it is also running out of water.

Tamborine Mountain has long been a battleground between developers and conservationists. It is where developers continued to gain approval for their subdivision applications in what should be a National Park.