Oh David, this is all just so wrong-headed!

Rather than some pie-in-the-sky dream of enormous agricultural expansion in the north, why don’t you advocate a stabilisation of the demand for food in this country, ie; an end to population growth?

Food security and political stability have got as much to do with the demand for food as they do with the supply capability.

You are thinking only of supply and completely omitting the demand factor. Not only this, but you are promulgating the ever-bigger demand by simply pandering to it with ever-more food production.

This is not the answer to food security and political stability. In fact it is just the opposite!

With anything like our current rate of population growth, even the most amazing increase in food production would hardly be able to keep up with it or stay ahead of it for long.

David, surely you can see that food security and political stability in Australia has got everything to do with keeping the demand within our food-production means, without going to enormous expense, and no doubt incurring many huge complications, in order to try and increase our food production by 100% or 50% or whatever.

< As for the north of Australia, the Plan says "large-scale expansion of irrigated agriculture in northern Australia-the scale of which would be required to create a northern food bowl-does not appear to be sustainable or feasible."

This is a curious point of view. >

There’s nothing curious about it! If it was feasible, it would have been done long ago. It’s as simple as that!

Considering Australia's population growth is dangerously low and is only sustained by immigration, domestically we have over supply food in 'Small Australia'.

If though we wanted to boost food trade with Asia, the NW of WA is probably a goer. The problem is David, you'd have to build dams and just mentioning the word 'dams' sets the Greens into fits of rage.

The solution is human population growth limits, not more dams.

Cheryl , fortunately that will become less of a problem over the next few years. Have a look at their results in the latest NSW Local Government Elections. Results that the normally noisy Greens are staying very quiet about..

In retrospect , the best thing for this country was the Labor/Green Alliance in Federal Politics. Now that we know what a rubbish collection of misfits that the Greens are, and also that Labor are finally getting up to challenge the Greens,this should quickly see the rapid decline in their fortunes.

Without going into the details of the reliable and in fact somewhat understated IPCC reports, about which this author is comprehensively wrong, I wish to draw attention to one intentionally misleading aspect of this article.

Rather than compare apples with apples, the <i>runoff</i> from the MDB is compared with the <i>rainfall</i> of Northern Australia (whatever that is... what are its boundaries?). This is somewhat akin to saying that the apple trees in Northern Australia NT are bigger than the apples in the MDB. This is then used to justify dam construction in northern Australia, despite the fact that the Ord River Dam has not yet returned to the governments which funded it the capital involved in its construction, after 50 years and despite its being located on the choicest available site in the Top End.

The author clearly is one of those who would prefer to keep civil engineers such as me employed building dams at any cost, rather than face the fact that our earth is finite. No amount of wishful thinking, prognostication or construction will alter that fact.

I look forward to this author's next article - perhaps something touching on his recommendations for global and national population and resource management over the next several millennia, with a view to ensuring satisfactory standards of living for all creatures in a healthy environment. Those issues were certainly missing from this one.

Forget the Greens. It is the native title holders in the East Kimberley who will decide if any further large-scale development on their country can go ahead.