Only prime ministers in a rush go out in the Townsville sun

Julia Gillard, Prime Minister for less than a month and with an election bearing down, is in a hurry, and it's a big Australia, whether she likes it or not.

It was a dawn start in Brisbane and a long flight to Townsville to visit a little family in a new housing estate to drive home her message that we should "stop, take a breath and plan a sustainable Australia".

Townsville is a city with a population rapidly heading towards 200,000 and a 12.1 per cent growth in jobs in the past year. It was, then, almost designed for Ms Gillard's vision of the sort of Australia we might have if more people turned their backs on the big cities and struck out for a life in the regions.

She is offering a distinctly modest $15 million to each of about 15 such regional areas to help build and plan the sort of facilities that might help the establishment of new housing estates.

The Townsville electorate, Herbert, is up for grabs after long-time Liberal member Peter Lindsay decided to retire, which may have helped the curious decision of the prime-minister-in-a-hurry to fly all the way to north Queensland for a couple of hours.

The Labor campaign team had organised a pleasing little tableau in a new housing development carved out of the Queensland scrub, workman holding shovels in the dusty yards of homes under construction and a young family waiting for the Prime Minister, cup cakes with pink icing, Tim Tams and cups of tea at the ready.

Brent and Lyndsey Goriss, married for 2? years and the parents of 19-month-old Willow, were anxious that Ms Gillard might find it a touch warm sitting on their patio in the baking sun. Not a bit of it, said the prime minister. "I'm defrosting after Canberra." And warming to this happy little staged play, you might imagine.

Lest the new housing estate and its sea of tiled and corrugated iron roofs look too empty, representatives of the developer, Stockland, had urged a couple of young mothers to bring their children to play in the park acoss the road. Nothing can be left to chance in an election campaign. The young mothers duly swung their children on swings and pushed them down slippery slides as Ms Gillard wandered across to the park to expand on her vision of a sustainable Australia to the crowd of media who had also flown from Brisbane to witness her visit to the Goriss home.

A supporting cast stood with her, nodding: Minister for a Sustainable Population Tony Burke, Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek and the local Labor candidate, Tony Mooney.

Mr Burke, not long ago, was simply Minister for Agriculture, but he has had an astonishing ride on the fraught business of working out what ought to constitute the Labor vision of Australia's future. Kevin Rudd made him Population Minister in an attempt to defuse community concerns about Australia's immigration trajectory. Ms Gillard, intent on killing Mr Rudd's unfortunate support for a "big Australia" rebadged Mr Burke as Minister for Sustainable Population. He didn't say anything at yesterday's press conference, but, he didn't need to: he was a prop, just like his title.

Small shifts in nomenclature, cup cakes on a northern patio and happy children playing with their mothers in a park. The election, Ms Gillard assured us, would be a "referendum on services for Australian families".

Soon, she was back on her plane to Sydney, where beneath the roofs of other housing estates on its western fringe, the story for this Prime Minister in a hurry is less cheery.