It seems Gillard’s over-arching election strategy is to slow Australia’s population growth, a populist pitch long available to Australia’s leaders and long resisted.

In the 60-plus years of postwar immigration, infrastructure investment has lagged people arrivals. It always does and it always will. This argument could have been deployed at any time in history to slow population growth but Gillard is the first Prime Minister to pull this lever.

Labor has decided on a poll-driven approach to probably Australia’s most important public policy achievement in its first century.

The issue is not that Australia needs better infrastructure and superior urban co-ordination and environmental planning. It does, undoubtedly.

But Gillard chooses to convert this into a political campaign for lower population growth.

It is a sure winner and a beautiful pitch to Greens, Hansonites and marginal seat voters in the suburbs with its nostalgic invocation of preserving “clean beaches and precious open spaces” that define “our Australian sanctuary”.

And the Prime Minister has also stoutly defended her industrial relations regime, insisting her Fair Work Act does not need to be tweaked despite ongoing complaints that its provisions prevent teenagers from taking after-school jobs.

On Tuesday Ms Gillard said in a speech that the nation needed to ask itself whether it was time to stop packing more people into Sydney’s western suburbs when the region’s infrastructure and services were struggling to meet the demands of the existing population.