The battery on the Mitsi Colt sounded like it’d had the fritz.

We bought the 2007 Mitsi when it was just a year old and had only 15,710 kilometres on the clock. It’d never been registered privately outside the now sadly departed Mitsubishi Australia factory at Clovelly Park. The service book has a sticker with the name Henry on the cover. Christian name? Surname? Who knows.

The factory closed in March 2008. We got the keys to the Colt in July that same year.

It’s a brilliant car, proof that good things really do come in small packages.

Disc brakes all round, superbly comfy seats, a quiet ride, a CVT automatic with an unusual column shift that leaves the floor uncluttered, and a 1.5 litre, four-cylinder donk that sips fuel at an average of 7 litres a 100 kilometres around town. Who needs a Tesla?

The Mitsi has now clocked up 75,945 kilometres with barely a hiccup.

So, when the compact Japanese chariot spat the dummy a couple of weeks back, not firing up its usual internal combustion enthusiasm, I wanted to make sure it was just a dying battery and not something else to do with “the electrics”.

We called the RAA. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, when you called the RAA for roadside assistance they’d answer the phone, ask you the problem and your location, and dispatch a mechanic driving a little yellow panel van to get you sorted.

Not anymore. Not this time, at least. We were put on hold by a computer, subjected to mind-bending music broken only by a recorded voice that informed us repeatedly they were very, very busy and maybe we’d like to use the app but otherwise just hang on because your call is not really all that important to us and we’ll get to you some time this century, yada yada yada.

It felt like the grease monkey’s version of ambulance ramping.

After 15 minutes without even speaking to a human being, let alone knowing a mechanic was on his or her way, I’d had enough of this malarky.

The Colt had just enough volts to grumble into life, so I drove to the Bob Jane T-Mart on Glen Osmond Road where they hooked it up to their gizmos, diagnosed a sick battery, installed a new one, money changed hands and I was back home before my cuppa had got cold.

South Australia is about the right size now. If anything, it’s a bit big for its boots.

It was with an overwhelming sense of irony, then, that I discovered in the past week that the CEO of the RAA, Nick Reade, has a cunning plan for South Australia.

Nick, former boss of BankSA, then chief of the Premier’s Department in the Marshall Liberal Government before scoring the job heading the state’s peak motoring body, thinks it’d be a grand idea if South Australia had a population target of two million people by 2032.

“We want to see the infrastructure in place and what I’d be advocating for is a measured growth in population,” he told The Advertiser.

“For me, it’d be two million by 2032. In 10 years time, at around two million, that’d be growing about 1.6 per cent, on average, for the next 10 years. That’ll get us to two million, and I think that’s a good aspirational number.”

The RAA boss argues that his target is “not too out there”. Yes, it is.

It’s so far out there it’s sitting somewhere south of the Planet Zork.

Our state’s population is a whisker under 1.8 million now, with most of us – around 1.35 million – living in Adelaide. Our population growth rate bounces around the 0.6 per cent mark.

Even so, we are a city and a state with profound infrastructure constraints, patched up by a crippling level of state government debt.

Does anyone seriously think that throwing an extra 200,00 people into the mix in less than a decade will improve our quality of life?

Like those of us already here, most new arrivals would end up trying to find a house and a job in Adelaide. If they need a hospital bed, they may only need to spend four hours ramped in the back of an ambulance. Good luck.

Even after a decade of mostly poor-quality urban infill, we are a city with a ridiculously big urban footprint for our population size.

Like a slice of pizza, Adelaide’s greater metropolitan area stretches in a wedge 95 kilometres long from south to north and 41 kilometres wide in the area roughly between One Tree Hill and Semaphore. Even as far back as 1984, we had an urban footprint bigger than Calcutta, with a fraction of the people.

Our existing road and public transport infrastructure has simply failed to match our current leisurely population growth.

Writing in The Advertiser’s opinion pages on Wednesday, Reade said Premier Peter Malinauskas had “hit the nail on the head” when he said population growth equals economic growth.

This is a tired mantra of our business lobbyists, like the Property Council, and it is disappointing to see the RAA jumping on the bandwagon.

The RAA is a fine, trusted organisation with a first-class domestic insurance arm.

But it could also be seen as a case study in why getting big isn’t always better.

Why does it take so long to simply answer road service calls? Don’t they have the “infrastructure in place” to handle them?

The RAA built up a sizeable home security service, with a local call centre staffed by people who were friendly and knowledgeable – they even proudly had an assortment of the most common home alarm keypads mounted on the call centre wall to help diagnose faults over the phone.

That’s vanished now. They flogged their customers off to a large, Texan-based conglomerate with an interstate call centre that, from my unhappy experience, sent out computer-generated SMSs if our home alarm went off.

After a few months, we switched to a smaller security provider with a local call centre that knows the difference between Salisbury and South Yarra, Dulwich and Dubbo. Bigger wasn’t better for us.

It’s all part of a News Corp “Bigger, Better” campaign, with sponsors including the RAA, the University of South Australia, Elders and, oddly, SkyCity casino. Nothing wrong with that.

But in the same breath, The Advertiser is not reviewing performances at the Adelaide Fringe this year, a move that InDaily reports has stunned the arts community.

The newspaper rejected any suggestion that its editorial decision had followed a bun fight over commercial arrangements with Fringe organisers, telling InDaily’s David Washington it is “covering the Fringe Festival on its merits”.

Nothing wrong with that, either, although it’s a sad state of affairs. These are tough times for media outfits, big and small. The paper probably just decided that when it came to Fringe reviews, bigger wasn’t necessarily better.

South Australia is about the right size now. If anything, it’s a bit big for its boots.

Just once, for a change of scenery, it’d be nice to see SA’s political and business brains having a crack at a “Smaller, Better” argument.

So I’m proposing a special festival gabfest with the working title: “Honey, I shrunk the city”. It’ll be a box office sensation. If it needs a logo, the Mitsi Colt will fit the bill, perfectly.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.