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.

Cheryl perhaps you did not notice that when our Brisbane greens were worried about their own water supply, we did not hear a single squeak out of them against the Mary river dam. Fortunately most are now realising that the greens are just a bad joke, on it's way to history.

It was the locals who had to fight the thing, & a few others who think that if the people of Brisbane want more water, they should build some dams in Brisbane, not Maryborough.

Diotima, just why should anyone anywhere, be it the cape or east Kimberley have any more say in where dams should go than any one else?

Now I happen to agree with you that it should be the locals who make decisions on what they want, but that should hold for everyone, the people of Maryborough just as much as those of the Kimberley.

However while the people of the Kimberley or Maryborough, are all too happy to hold out their hands for community money, they should loose the right for exclusive self determination. If they want a share of community wealth, than they have to be prepared to accept community decisions on things like dams.

As with all boosters of the never-ending "growth" of both the economy and the human population there is no consideration of the fact that such a situation is impossible on a finite planet.

Our present-time "civilization" is an absurd soap opera, a lunatic asylum created by TV. That TV created absurd soap opera actually controls the destiny and the potential experience of the total world of human beings, although some so called libertarians might like to pretend that they are "free". Never mind that every aspect of everyones body, mind,emotions and actions has been programmed by the system.

That absurd titty-tainment soap opera is, in its root disposition, totally indifferent to the well-being of both human life and of Earthkind altogether, including of course Black Ducks.

Black ducks are dapper ducks (although the person who named them would have to be daffy, coz they ain’t anywhere near black!!)

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=pacific+black+duck&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1280&bih=599&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=dkCm2cgworG7GM:&imgrefurl=http://curiouserr.blogspot.com/&docid=WdDMgF4HrfBnpM&imgurl=http://www.charliesbirdblog.com/~charlie/SYD26feb06/blackduck.jpg&w=600&h=408&ei=nopSUMeND-GPiAetuoHABg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=802&vpy=85&dur=2856&hovh=185&hovw=272&tx=121&ty=104&sig=104114398348957169127&page=1&tbnh=109&tbnw=152&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0,i:101

Pink-eared ducks on the other hand are completely daffy-looking!

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=pink-eared+duck&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1280&bih=599&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=MW4DruAm9HgnnM:&imgrefurl=http://www.avianweb.com/pinkearedduck.html&docid=bx2MxaY6q2LvgM&imgurl=http://www.avianweb.com/images/birds/Ducks/PinkearedDuck2.jpg&w=461&h=326&ei=VYtSUNDlGbGhiAfRxYDQAg&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=418&sig=104114398348957169127&page=1&tbnh=119&tbnw=159&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0,i:84&tx=72&ty=58

Um…. where was I? Oh yeah, dams in northern Australia.

Yes, the Argyle Dam is on the best site in northern Australia and is still marginal. As for damming the rivers in the flat lands around the Gulf, or turning the coastal rivers inland, or piping water across the ranges or tunnelling through them, just forget it completely. It is too daffy to waste a second thought on!!

An excellent example why the Liberal Democratic Party will never be a force in a government in Australia. As has been pointed already if it was so great up there why has Argyle been a runaway success. The greens might flawed because of their attachment to ideals, but you have no attachment to reality which is even worst.

Just what the country needs, another Ord river project, private profit at public expense.

A thoughtful, well argued and logical article!
Northern rainfall is measured in metres, and myriad small upland dams, rather than just a few very large ones, would not only force the landscape to store far more water, but see a lot less of it rushing out to sea, along with trillions of tons of alluvium, which routinely destroys both the reef systems and sea grass habitat!
[Water is almost the most inert substance, and storing it behind small dams mitigates against further erosion almost better than anything else?]
Sea grass absorbs three times the carbon of all the forest of the world! A fact that is routinely ignored by tree hugging eco-fascists?
Moreover many modest weirs of just two or three metres, and not less than thirty metres wide, would each power around thirty homes.
And if one included locks, they could turn many waterways into bulk transport, lowest energy using, highways or landing strips for float/amphibious planes.
Northern water could be transported as far south as northern SA, by the simple expediency of injecting/gravity fed surplus water, into the Great Artesian Basin? Just 100 metres of fall, translating into 150PSI?
Climate change scenarios and a warmer wetter world, see more rain falling on our northern climes rather than less.
[Recent record floods, just a harbinger of far worse to come?]
Moreover, the widespread planting of tropical food, fruit and nut trees, would mitigate against both heat and climate change.
On a hot northern wet season day, just about the coolest place is under the mango tree.
And there are any number of understory crops that can be also grown, like say coffee or cocoa/pumpkins or sweet potatoes etc/etc?
Rhrosty.

David. a good post that gets to the 'nub' of the issue.

when you state "due to anti-development bigotry and discredited climate change advice" I could not agree more.

It is my understanding that the report was commissioned and, following a change of government, new guidelines were issued that specifically instructed the authors NOT to consider dams and irrigation, Well, the results would inevitably be a report that is really quite worthless.

Once again I read calls for there to be a cessation from increased demand due to population increases, calls for 'population' control etc. and, once again no proposing a mechanism for achieving said population control. The Chinese solution perhaps?

The only mechanism I have seen for Effective population control is both the Chinese solution and wealth generation.

Hot to facilitate wealth generation? cheap plentifully food and cheap plentiful energy.

Can anyone here recommend a 'third way'?

So, because our economy doesn't allow us to have children some experts suggest we should import more people. what morons !
Get rid of the morons in the Public Service who work like mad to keep on damaging our economy & we'll be able to have our own children, thank you very much.
We can grow sufficient food for ourselves without ruining the North Of Australia as well.

Rhrosty, up until now I haven’t really had any major issue with your posts. But suddenly, you seemed to have flipped out. Or perhaps you’ve always been that way!

<< Sea grass absorbs three times the carbon of all the forest of the world! A fact that is routinely ignored by tree hugging eco-fascists? >>

What??

Both seagrass beds and forests are carbon-neutral! They are only carbon absorbers if you kill off a seagrass bed or clear a forest and then let it regrow, and only take into account the carbon absorbed in the recovery phase!

What’s this about eco-fascists?

Well, I will no longer think of you as a balanced or reasonable commentator. The use of such terminology achieves just one thing – to destroy the credibility of the user!

Ok, so you advocate lots of small dams, etc. But to what end?

If we are going to just blunder forth with rapid population growth, what would it achieve?

It might help with food provision and export income a little bit, for a while. But it would also just help facilitate this totally antisustainable and future-destroying population growth.

Now if the sort of things you advocate were done within a sustainability regime, with a stable population, then yes, they might have some merit.

<< The only mechanism I have seen for Effective population control is both the Chinese solution and wealth generation >>

Gee Prompete, you haven’t thought about this very much have you.

All we need to do in Australia is to get our immigration down to net zero. That’s it. Oh and getting rid of the baby bonus bribe would help as well.

Then our natural fertility rate would lead us to a stable population, after a couple of decades, with a slow and steadily decreasing rate of growth up until then.

Ludwig. The population problem is not in Australia. We have a surplus of food here, I refer to those decrying overpopulation of the planet. Perhaps we could alleviate some of the overpopulation of all those third world countries by opening our borders here?

Everybody who thinks that we live on a finite planet put up their hand.

Now take that hand and hit yourself hard in the back of the head.

Now go outside and look up. See that bright, burny, looking thing? Is that part of our planet? No. Does it provide energy to the planet and all living things? Yes. Good glad we have cleared that up. Now no more of this finite planet BS, OK?

Now if you want to discuss the finite sun, I'm all ears.

@ Lugwig... Your not thinking holistically at all, the population issue is global and that makes it Australia's buring our head in the sand and ignoring it won't help.

I would love to see Government help promote population reduction strategies; eg stop family allowances, eliminate baby bonusus and child care subsidies, (phased out over say a decade), free vasectomies, the pill etc available over the counter for free... we can lead the way and show others in the World how to do it but limiting immigration is one of the worst things to do. We need to bring people to Aus, show them the way and let them disseminate that back to their home lands.

None of that will ever happen and the Worlds population will continue to grow.... and if we don't feed them and utilise the resources we have (and keep destroying the environment in doing so,) they will just come and take it. After we have depleted all of their resources (70% of our fish is imported for example because we don't invest in fish farms to replace wild caught stock) where are they going to turn ?

Prompete, the global population growth rate could be reined in without draconian policies, if governments could just get it through their thick heads to promote family planning and implement incentives to have fewer kids.

Iran is a shining example… except that they are now reversing these policies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&idim=country:IRN&dl=en&hl=en&q=iran+population+growth

Ludwig. I completely agree with you, informative links, thanks.

When you refer to 'draconian policies', I read that as policies that have an element of coercion, as opposed to a parents free will choosing how many children to have.
So, in a pragmatic world, how do we persuade parents in say Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Congo or Ruwanda to have fewer children?

Children can be seen as an 'insurance policy' for our old age, the more you have and the more that survive to adulthood, the more you are assured that you can have a tolerable life past your 'productive' period of life.

Several elements need to be in place to assure your average Bangladeshi that they will be ok in old age. First, a health system that reasonable assures you that the children that you do have will survive and prosper to the extent that they will have the excess resources available to feed you.
Second, in the likelihood that they may not have the resources to feed, clothe and house you, the backup assurance that the state will have the resources to do the same, as well as having a health infrastructure with a degree of geriatric expertice.
Third, an education and communication system that drives/facilitates the 'planned parenthood' programs needed to implement such policies.

The above, somewhat simplisically listed factors, disregards the cultural drivers of large families, tribal norms and other deep inbuilt factors working against a two or one child family norm.
I think that when and if we can encourage and assist those countries in achieving the resources as evident in Australia, US, Europe, Japan and other 'wealthy' nations with Close to ZPG, we are fighting a loosing battle.

I do not wish to deride or belittle those expressing frustration with world population anxieties, but wish to illustrate that achieving a stabilization in population, without draconian impost of the state, is a complex generational task requiring considerable wealth; hence my stance on assisting to provide healthy abundant food, the mechanism to move and trade it and abundant cheap energy.

I agree with Ludwig, trees store carbon whether horizontal or vertical! Moreover, Indigenous populations have been selectively harvesting their forests for millennia, with no hurt or harm to their forests/flora or fauna.
In fact, very selective harvesting is usually beneficial, allowing new and vastly more robust forest growth to emerge, and in so doing, within a comparatively short period of time, to begin to absorb far more carbon, than the old growth they replaced!
However, the misunderstood point I was making; was, our oceans create two thirds of the planets oxygen and are the lungs of the planet; and therefore, deserving of at least as much care and concern as say, over-harvested or clear felled forests?
There are a number of reasons for preferencing many small upland dams.
Firstly, they force massive water into the landscape, where as an envelope of fresh, they force salt to sink deeper, to where it does little or no harm.
Well positioned upland dams, stop erosion and trap the alluvium that usually clogs downstream flows; and or, covers both reef and sea grass, killing great swathes of both in the process.
And sure, both of these systems are far more robust than usually depicted and seem to recover, time after time, from all manner of damage.
I mean, they've survived considerable climate change, and conditions far worse than are common today, for millions of years.
Because many small dams quite literally force water into the landscape, they mitigate far more effectively against rapid stream rises/flash floods, than much larger and fewer dams.
And when the wet season is replaced by a dry one, many small upland dams continue to allow the massive landscape stored, cleaner water, to gradually release back into the system, extending environmental flows for years beyond what is normal now.
Or, as was normal before white settlement and the quite massive deforestation that followed.
They also improve the fertility and production outcomes/possibilities of upland pastures.
Also, vastly extended and far more reliable flows, would allow many new modest hydro schemes, where none are currently feasible!
Rhrosty.

I stand by the term tree hugging eco fascist, but reserve it for a very few, who replace reason with manifestly manufactured rage?
Like those globe trotting, jet-setting, carbon creating, so-called Canadian activists, who with great song and dance, trampled/trespassed over our tiny shale oil pilot plant! All while Canada was busy/busy, developing its mind-blowing, massive, Middle East sized, tar sands hydrocarbon reserves?
Hydrocarbons, which due to the number of, from deposit to tank, processing requirements, produce four times the carbon of our own virtually ready to use, sweet light crude or NG.
Which poses the greatest threat to the planet?
I'm also minded of a visit from a high profile, female American marine biologist, who counselled us not to mine our reef for its possibly massive low carbon hydrocarbon reserves?
It seems the Lady scientist was not all she claimed? Given her principle funding seemed to come from a very large oil company?
I apologise to my many conservationist friends, if they thought they were included in my terminology?
Please, if the eco-fascist cap doesn't fit, then simply don't wear it!
I agree, we need to rein in population growth! We can as others have suggested, do that; via, shining successful example.
That example is as simple as recycling everything; and or, growing your economy/discretionary spending sustainably, through attacking and removing poverty in all its forms and guises, wherever it is found; and, ensuring that education is universal, rather than gender biased or privileged!
These three, almost alone, are the non population growth examples, that will still produce sustainable abundance and "enough" wealth creating entrepreneurial examples for the go-getters; or, for others to emulate.
I've always thought the very best way to put the high carbon producing oil enterprises out of business, was to flood the market with far lower costing, lower carbon producing alternatives!
If you see the inescapable logic in that; then you will also see; that mining the reef for its possibly massive, much lower carbon producing products; is the only realistic means, currently available to us, to save it!
Rhrosty.

<<@Lugwig… Your not thinking holistically at all, the population issue is global and that makes it Australia's buring our head in the sand and ignoring it won't help. >>

What a strange comment, Valley Guy!

Of course we need to address global population, as well as Australia’s population growth rate!

Now, you seem to be saying something entirely contradictory here:

You say that we could lead the way in showing the world how to implement population-growth-reduction strategies. But then you say that limiting immigration is one of the worst things we could do!!

So, if Australia is going to continue to have very high population growth via immigration, then why should we bother at all about reducing our fertility rate?

Great article; and look at the luddites, populate and perish misanthropes and assorted greenies go bananas, which incidentally are a great cash crop and would feature strongly in any NW developement.

Australia has about the same land mass as continental USA, the World's most advanced economy and only superpower, yet we have 1/15 of their population.

Either we populate it in a measured way, that is without importing the Islam problem [ http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/police-gas-sydney-protesters-20120915-25yrb.html#ixzz26Vt9koYL ] or the teeming masses of Asia will populate it for us.

Cohenite,

Europeans have known about the Sahara far longer than than they have known about Australia. So why hasn't someone populated it? These maps of Australia from Dr. Chris Watson of the CSIRO show average rainfall and the distribution of fertile soil.

http://www.australianpoet.com/boundless.html

Here is a comparable map from Wikipedia for the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_rainfall_climatology

See the difference? Here is a world map of soil quality from the US Department of Agriculture, ranking soils by performance and resilience.

http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/landqual.html

Australia isn't really a big country. It is a small to medium-sized country around a big desert. Apart from some alluvial areas and old volcanic hotspots, soils tend to be poor because they have not been renewed by glaciation or mountain building. Our agriculture is heavily dependent on added nutrients such as phosphate rock, which may well be in short supply in the future. In 1994, the Australian Academy of Sciences recommended 23 million as a safe upper limit for Australia's population.

So far as Northern Australia is concerned, people in what is now Indonesia knew about it for thousands of years before Captain Cook. If it had been suitable for their sort of agriculture, they would have settled it. Alternatively, their Aboriginal trading partners would have learned agriculture from them, expanded their population, and pushed out the hunter/gatherers. Both these sorts of things happened in Europe after agriculture was developed in the Near East. The main problems relate to poor soil, the long dry season with ferocious evaporation rates, and lack of suitable dam sites because of very flat land. Dams can't just be built anywhere. Perhaps JohnBennetts could elaborate on this.

Here is a link to the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce report. They did find that some agricultural development might be worthwhile, but nothing like the growthist fantasies(Foodbowl for Asia!). The ABC's Future Tense went to Northern Australia after the report came out and interviewed a number of agricultural scientists for Radio National. They said much the same things as the Taskforce report.

http://www.nalwt.gov.au/files/NLAW.pdf

But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideology.

It is a pity that the article's main assumption: that it would be possible to grow vast amounts of food in Northern Australia has barely been challenged. I assert that the assumption is false.
The land has not been glaciated and there is very little volcanic origin soil. Consequently most of the soils are both poor and thin. Rainfall is low and wildly variable. Much of the continent is flat hence there are very few; in some areas no,places suitable for damming. There are very high evaporation rates. Not only does that affect agricultural prospects directly it also means that impoundments that are shallow would have staggering losses from evaporation.
The Issues paper for 'a sustainable populatuin for Australia' is generally poor in that it ignores the geological and climatological FACTS about most of the North. in particular the section led by H Ridout, the Business leader, is appalling. For example it states over a pretty map of the world ' much of Australia has a rainfall comparable with much of Europe and N America'. Much of Australia is shown in a nice green colour. Presumably showing that there is good agricultural potential. So somewhere a bit north of Mt Isa is as good for agriculture as East Anglia? Moronic. However things get better. The nice green presumably fertile areas include all of Iceland, parts of Greenland, large lumps of Siberia and the Kamchatka peninsula.
The only potentials for agriculture up here in the North are for small areas such as the Gilbert river area.
The article is flawed totally as it is based on false assumptions.

"But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideology."

I don't have an ideology; you obviously do. I read your links; very poetic; the only one with any pretensions to science is the NT one which descends to "sustainability".

Some specifics;

Is anyone seriously suggesting that the NW is not amenable to agriculture on large scale with modern technology applied to such problems as 'difficult' soil?

Evaporation is a furphy; as are dams; if AGW can force witless Green led governments to build Desal plants then they can be built in the NW and supply water on a needs basis with evaporation minimised and the issue of dams made irrelevant.

The pessimism of the nay and doomsayers is unfortunately what dictates policy these days and we are the worse off for it. I'm sure if the same 'sustainable' principles were around when the Snowy was built it would not have got the 'green' light.

Well said Divergence and eyejaw.

.

<< So, in a pragmatic world, how do we persuade parents in say Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Congo or Ruwanda to have fewer children? >>

Prompete, it is certainly more difficult than in Australia or China or Iran, but basically by way of education especially for women and girls, access to contraception, and a host of other things that lead to a general improvement in the quality of life.

Sure it is complex. But so is the rest of the story – increasing food supplies, arresting environmental degradation, tackling climate change, etc.

Really, we need to be thinking about a sustainable world, not just how to feed an ever-growing population. And that necessitates us putting as much effort into addressing population stabilisation and then gentle reduction as it does into EVERYTHING else put together!

The trouble is that currently we are just about entirely ignoring the population factor, that is; the demand side of the equation, and putting practically all our efforts into the supply side of the equation. Not only is this wildly unbalanced, but it is actually facilitating the ever-increasing demand and hence blowing out our chances of achieving a sustainable world or of feeding a considerably larger population a few years down the track.

Think about that for a moment. It really is just extraordinarily BAD!!

You could say that most of our efforts in the realms of technological and agricultural advancement are actually taking us BACKWARDS for as long as we don’t earnestly address the population factor!

<< Either we populate it in a measured way… or the teeming masses of Asia will populate it for us. >>

I appreciate your concern, cohenite.

So, how would you have us populate in a measured way, and to what extent?

And what would it achieve as far as alleviating your concerns goes?

Australia has something like half a million people in the northern half of the continent, most of which is on the east coast of north Queensland. If we opened the north right up the maximum, with a network of small dams, a small number of large dams and maximised irrigation projects, we could perhaps double or triple that population and spread it out a bit more evenly across the north.

So how would this aid our national security?

It would still be piffling compared to the 100 million in Java and 300 million in all of Indonesia.

Not only would it do nothing to stop a population influx from the north, but it would if anything make it more likely by making northern Australia look considerably more inviting.

You are right, Ludwig. It is even harder to imagine India or China, with more than a billion people each, quaking in their boots because we have 35 million or even 50 million people rather than 20 million.

Cohenite,

Mark O'Connor merely made those maps available on his website. They are the work of Dr. Chris Dixon of the CSIRO. I am surprised that a CSIRO scientist and the US Department of Agriculture should be considered to "have no pretensions to science". The US rainfall map is from Wikipedia, but average rainfall is hardly controversial. As for sustainability, soil resilience is ranked along with soil performance in the US Dept. of Agriculture map. There is no point in developing land if what you intend to do with it will wreck it in a few years and reduce or eliminate its value for its previous lower intensity use.

Desalination plants are very expensive and prodigious users of electricity. Costs vary, but generally it is claimed that desalinated water is 4 to 6 times as expensive as dam water. See for example

http://www.theage.com.au/business/water-waste-of-our-dam-money-20081116-685h.html

The newest plants are more efficient, but electricity is also getting a lot more expensive. They might be worthwhile for coastal cities, but the energy costs of pumping the water inland would be prodigious. Remember that about 70% of the water we use is for agriculture.

There's another one of those pesky elephants in the room.
If you fly over the eastern areas of Qld at certain times of the year, you'll see thin long verdant corridors of irrigated land lining the rivers, where everywhere else is brown and dry.
Yes, water is essential to agriculture, undeniably so; but the recent drought demonstrated 2 things very clearly.
Firstly, it showed just how unreliable our river systems are. If we had been totally reliant on these rivers and the resultant agriculture, many would have starved.
The second point is much more interesting. Many farmers during the drought, were restricted to using no more than 2% of the water quota they had paid for. The vast bulk of the available water was diverted to keep the people of Brisbane and the SE corner happy and wet.
And after all these urbanites had used this water, where did it go?
The most certain, most reliable -and nutrient enriched!- supply of water is not from rainfall or from rivers.
It's not in the Far North, thousands of kilometres from the major markets.
It's already where the bulk of the population lives.
Instead of looking for more water to waste, why don't we just use the water we already have?

Why is it so many fail to look beyond the tip of their nose when contemplating future prospects and development? Some other countries plan decades or even centuries ahead, while we generally look only to the next election or two.

The Ord River Scheme and the development of agriculture around Kununurra are massive success stories. So what if the relevant infrastructure may never be fully paid for? They will continue to be productive for the long haul, and offer a productive model and base-point from which to plan and implement future effective expansion. Why? Well, whether AGW predictions are correct or not, the capacities and future potentials for the southern agricultural areas (MD Basin, Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area) are finite and relatively limited, and, whether we like it or not we will have to increase our future food production if only to maintain GDP as our mining boom becomes a trickle.

Short sighted? Because Oz failed to go into debt to develop our mineral resources, most of the returns therefrom have gone to foreign investors, with Oz settling only for modest royalties. We didn't sell the farm, we just rented it at an extraordinarily cheap rate. What are we doing now? Selling the productive capacity (which could well be massive food-production capacity) of Cubbie Station to foreign interests - because we are hooked on foreign investment. Are we so timid and uncertain that we cannot risk doing something big for ourselves? Next stop is the Tasmanian Dairy industry - the processing side is already sold, so why not the farms as well?

One day we may be looking at renting all of our productive capacity from various foreign investors - share farmers in our own land. Now that's a future it should be worth avoiding, even if it costs a few bucks and some hard choices along the way.