Don't know about Canberra but the Gold Coast and Newcastle figures are about right.
Gold Coast gained a tonne of people when they merged with Albert.
Quite right. The Gold Coast did gain plenty. Infact, that figure for the Coast is pretty much spot on. The Canberra figure is pretty close to the mark aswell, but the Newy figure is way off. Lake Mac alone is up around 190,000 at the moment. Newcastle's figure is hard to gaugue accurately but the common figure given for the total of the city in its entirety is around 470-500,000 and when adding the Hunter region altogther (incl. Port, Uppper Hunter, etc) it comes to 650,000. Singleton up in the Valley is even listed on that site as only at 12,000 when it is actually around 22,000. There are plenty of innacuracies, but oh well, its pretty difficult to find a site that is accurate with these sorts of things.
As for the debate about Redcliffe, instead of using the existing Dolphins Club as the next possible bid for a Qld NRL team after the Gold Coast, at the rate at which the Sunshine Coast is growing and expanding towads Brisbane, Redcliffe could possibly be the base for a Sunshine Coast club encompassing the whole region. At the very least it could give the area reason to identify with the team instead of just a locality such as Redcliffe itself. By that time we would have teams representing North Queensland, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. At least that would be heading in a positive direction for Qld representation in the comp.
Cheers.