Develop northern Australia?

There has ALWAYS been the desire amongst the starry-eyed expansionists to develop the north. And they have always had the political and financial backing to go for it if they could show that it was feasible and viable…because our poliies have always sat firmly within the starry-eyed expansionist camp!

But if it was easy or even quite difficult but feasible, it would have been done by now!

It is not developable country! At least not without some very strong and highly artificial incentives, for which the Australia taxpayer would foot an enormous bill… with not much to show for it.

As you say Murray;

< …there is a danger that the whole concept will come down to a government web of tax breaks and subsidies, without anything really being developed. >

Absolutely.

Abbott said: "We are determined to break the ongoing deadlock that has held Northern Australia back so long"

Well, I say to him that his thinking is all wrong!!

What he should be thinking about, but which is evidently completely not within his brainspace, is how to develop a sustainable Australian society!

Striving to open up the north and turn it into some vast food bowl, is NOT what we need to achieve a sustainable future.

Is Abbott's Northern Australian idea a grand vision or folly?

Definitely folly.

Small minded nonsense. People like you should get out of the way and let those with some imagination and gumption get on with it. You're a taker, not a contributor.

So DavidL, is it small-minded nonsense to desire a sustainable future?

It is nonsense to desire the demand for all our basic resources and the supply capability to be in balance, instead of both the supply and demand getting forever bigger, and with the environmental and quality-of-life impacts getting ever bigger along with it?

Come on David, give us your vision of our future. Lets’ see how ‘big’ your mind really is.

BTW, I am not against all development in the north. Some development would be fine, for as long as it is economically feasible in the long term, and most importantly for as long as it is part of a policy of achieving sustainability, rather than part of the same old facilitation of population growth and hence of increasing demand along with supply (of food and export income)…. which really would be nonsensical, and would do nothing to help us achieve the essential sustainability paradigm.

DavidL should consider that misconceived agricultural projects have done enormous harm to people and to the environment. SBS recently ran a four part series on the Dust Bowl in the US in the 1930s, America's biggest environmental disaster. People were fooled by the lies of the boosters and by a series of unusually wet years into growing wheat on land on the Great Plains that should only have been used for grazing.

The farmers had a few good years, and then the rains failed in the 1930s. They lost crop after crop and then went bankrupt. Some went to California to work as farm labourers (the so-called Okies). The constant winds picked up the bare topsoil and blew up enormous dust storms, and there were many deaths from dust pneumonia. The elderly people who had lived through it as children and were interviewed for the series were still traumatised and still grieved for the brothers and sisters who had died of the dust pneumonia. The dust storms reached as far as cities on the Atlantic such as Boston. Maybe those people needed a bit of small-minded thinking before they got into such a mess.

You might also read up on how the Soviet government destroyed the Aral Sea.

The Northern Land and Water Taskforce did find some opportunities for agricultural development, but nothing like the 'food bowl for Asia' spruiking. Future Tense on Radio National interviewed a number of agricultural scientists in Northern Australia after the Taskforce report came out, and they agreed with it. Perhaps the rest of us should listen.

Other reports say other things, or the complete opposite!
We've always had experts who always knew all the reasons something couldn't or wouldn't be done!
If we had bothered listening to many of them, we'd still be living in caves; and running our food down with a stone tied onto a stick!
All that is really missing is the infrastructure; and all that is required to produce that in quite massive nation building improvements; is an entirely reformed and completely unavoidable tax system.
That then claws back an estimated 100 billion plus per, that is currently being withheld, courtesy of avoidance or the vagaries of the global economy.
Vagaries we need to adjust for, or end!
Rhrosty.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" (Niels Bohr)

The idea that we need government committee to develop a grand vision and pass this through a white paper is a sure recipe for failure. After living in the north for many years I am of the opinion that it has huge potential, but the current government (generally not just the party of the day) of it restricts and distorts its growth into the wrong areas. Essentially you need to foster an environment where new businesses can evolve to the conditions not have governments decide who is in charge of the bread supply of Moscow, sorry Darwin.

Imagine for a second the growth that would occur if you set tax rates (corporate, individual and other) north of the Tropic of Capricorn to a quarter of the "southern" rate, “simplified’ the import/export process for goods from this region and released enough land that a house block cost less than the median yearly wage (there is no shortage of land in the north). Not all of the initial growth would last, but the evolutionary process would ensure that the ones most suited would take root. And who knows, the Leffler curve may even mean that it’s actually revenue positive for Canberra.

The wet tropics are just that, and where annual rainfall is measures in metres.
The danger of it turning into a dust bowl is farcical, but particularly, if the crops grown are mostly tree and or under-story crops. (Rubber, avocado, diesel trees, coffee, cocoa, sweet potatoes?)
There's as much protein in a single avocado, as a T-bone steak!
Moreover, if anybody bothered to look, there is far better grazing in in open forest as opposed to treeless plains, referred to by an earlier scaremongering poster.
And many crops can be grown in long wide rows, if companion hedgerow tree planting, also included in the farming plan!
If they had done that in the vast treeless American prairies, they might have retained their soil and productive farms, even to today?
And some of our natives, salt, frost and drought tolerant crops, like the soil and fertility improving legume, perennial native wisteria, could be trialled.
The oil rich seed is a useful source of omega three, or bio diesel, and the ex-crush material is a protein rich source that would support many feed-lots, chicken/pig production or fish farming.
After seven years, the less productive woody material, could be given over to bio-char production, which after extracting some gas or methanol, could be buried to further improve the soil and sequester carbon!
Coincidently, a fish farm the size of Eagle Farm's main runway, would produce as much annual profit as 10,000 acres of sustenance grazing; and, the fish filtrate, would likely support enough oil rich algae, so as to make the enterprise self sufficient in fuel needs. [And we do need to do something practical, to preserve and grow our wild ocean fish stocks!]
Extracting oil from oil rich algae, is as simple as sun-drying the harvested material and then crushing it, perhaps utilising a simple inexpensive water wheel and copious northern water?
Never say never!
Rhrosty.

The Dust Bowl story is merely an example of how people can do enough damage with misconceived agricultural development to wreck the environment and ruin themselves. I never suggested (and it is foolish to imagine) that Northern Australia would have exactly the same problems as the Oklahoma Panhandle. Here is a link to a world map from the US Department of Agriculture showing soil performance and soil resilience (i.e., whether it possible for the soil to go on producing in the same way).

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

There is a link that you can click to get a pdf file with a high quality image where you can see all of the details.

What puzzles me, is why you would prefer to believe uninformed boosters rather than agricultural scientists familiar with the area. It is worth noting that agricultural scientists of the day warned Australian politicians against introducing the cane toad and about the potential for salinity problems (which could have been avoided with proper management) in the Murray Darling basin. Needless to say, they were ignored. There are great dangers in believing what you want to believe.

Some of Rhosty's ideas might actually have merit, but they need to be properly tested before people are encouraged to bet everything they have on them.

It amazes me the way 'sustainable' is code for anti/non-development. The spin offs to the Snowy Mountain scheme were enormous. When previous 'reports' were commissioned that specifically excluded such things a dams and irrigation then the inevitable result was all just 'too hard'.
This is a brilliant vision well worth serious study.

Luddy just what has sustainability got to do with garbage scrub, full of pigs & heaps of other exotic vermin, & consisting of a huge percentage of noxious weeds overtaking the original flora. Who wants a landscape of prickly Acacia, & rubber vine, except those who want to deprive humans from using it.

Why is it desirable to maintain a plant population totally dictated by the continual burning by the aboriginals.

This snapshot of a moment in nature being treated as something that must be now maintained for ever is the major weakness of the green & the sustainability lobby. In most instances any reasonably intelligent person can improve most landscapes quite easily, greenies excepted, but then reasonably intelligent excludes them anyway.

Divergence I presume you are talking about academics, so will ignore your suggestion we listen to them as that is a recipe for disaster in most endeavors. Genuine agricultural specialists have had little to do with the area, so know little. However give half a million Chinese a go at it, & they would feed millions.

<< It amazes me the way 'sustainable' is code for anti/non-development. >>

Prompete, it amazes me that some people can have such an end-of-the-spectrum perspective.

Come on, you know full well what sustainability is, at least in the broad sense, and you also know full well that those who espouse a sustainable future are not ‘non-development’!

Of course what we need is the type of development that is in line with the achievement of a sustainable future, rather than the type that continues to take us in the opposite direction… which could rightly be called anti-development.

<< This is a brilliant vision well worth serious study. >>

This vision of vast northern development HAS been studied over the years. As I say; if it had been feasible, it would have been done at least to a fair extent by now.

What needs serious study is how we achieve a sustainable future.

If considerable development of the north is part of it, then fine. But if this development is done with the same old ‘growth-is-good-and-faster-growth-is-better-and-nothing-else-really-matters’ dictum that has always prevailed in this country, then no, we should NOT develop the north.

Unfortunately, you can bet your bottom dollar that Abbott and his mob are just another bunch of growth-pandering sustainability-blind drongoes.

<< Luddy just what has sustainability got to do with garbage scrub, full of pigs & heaps of other exotic vermin, & consisting of a huge percentage of noxious weeds overtaking the original flora. >>

I dunno Hazza. What HAS it got to do with it?? ( :>|

<< Who wants a landscape of prickly Acacia, & rubber vine, except those who want to deprive humans from using it. >>

Huh? So, how much of the north is dominated by prickly Acacia or rubber vine?

As bad as these weeds are, very little scrub (or woodland or grassland) is dominated by them... or any other weeds.

<< Why is it desirable to maintain a plant population totally dictated by the continual burning by the aboriginals. >>

Vast areas, in fact the vast majority of the northern half of the continent, is no longer subjected to Aboriginal burning practices, nor to a modern approximation of them.

Hey, there is plenty of room for the maintenance of ecological values AND for extensive agriculture.

But that agriculture needs to be viable, and genuinely in our best interests, ie; in line with a sustainable future.

Otherwise, forget it.

Exactly what sustainability means depends on what you are trying to preserve. If it is agricultural land, you want to keep the land producing in the same way indefinitely, so you follow good farming practices: you don't let the topsoil blow away, don't poison the land with salt, etc. This is hardly controversial. If there is no way that you can farm without creating a wasteland in a few years, it is better not to start. The Okies didn't just bankrupt themselves, they damaged good grazing land.

This report (from a private company in the agricultural sector, not an environmental organization) summarises the research findings to date.

http://www.agrow.com.au/assets/pdf/Australia's%20Top%20End%20Food%20Bowl%20Debate.pdf

Irrigation and dams very much were considered. In all the writing about this that I have seen, the main problems for the 'food bowl for Asia' idea include poor soil, the long dry season with ferocious rates of evaporation, and a lack of suitable dam sites.

While I wouldn't want to denigrate practical knowledge or claim that scientists always get it right, agricultural science has been the great success story of the 20th century. Norman Borlaug and the other scientists behind the Green Revolution doubled or tripled grain productivity, averting (or at least putting off) the famines Paul Ehrlich (and a lot of other people) had predicted for the 1970s and saving the lives of perhaps a billion people. Are you sure that you want to sneer at such scientists, Hasbeen? Here in Australia, the scientists were right about the cane toad, and the cane farmers pushing for its introduction were wrong.

As for the 'million Chinese', people in what is now Indonesia have been growing rice for thousands of years and knew about Australia long before Captain Cook. If Northern Australia was great for their sort of agriculture, then why didn't they settle it? Or why didn't their aboriginal trading partners learn agriculture from them? Both these sorts of things happened in Europe after agriculture was developed in the Near East.

(cont'd)

(cont'd)

Like Ludwig, I am not automatically opposed to any development, but judging by the expert opinion so far, this initiative is likely to turn into a giant boondoggle that all of us taxpayers will have to subsidise. If developing a giant food bowl is such a great idea, then why hasn't the private sector invested in it, or even set up pilot projects? The FAO World Food Price Index has been extremely high by historical standards since 2008.

The other issue is that the politicians will use this scheme at an excuse for additional mass migration, with the migrants eventually ending up in places like Sydney and Melbourne, where they will compete with the existing residents for jobs, housing, public services, and amenities. Our brilliant leaders in the major parties have seen to it that we are now acquiring five new people for every new full-time job. Three quarters of those new jobs are going to people born overseas (457 visas, anyone?), even though they are only 31% of the population. See this article by Tim Colebatch, the Economics Editor of the Melbourne Age

http://www.theage.com.au/national/skilled-newcomers-flood-fulltime-jobs-market-20130614-2o9vm.html#ixzz2WGauEboK

We will get to subsidise the unemployed people as well and put up with the indirect social costs.

A very interesting project and well worth studying.
If it comes off it would be beneficial for the country way into the future.
However it will need a very large input in energy to build the support
infrastructure. If we continue our export rate of coal and natural gas
then I doubt we could do the job.
Once the area had significant development under way large energy input
would be needed to build and extend the railways and local roads.
The major fuel requirements will be electricity and gas. Diesel will
only be available in comparatively small quantities and at a high cost.
Gas will be need to produce fertiliser.

The inherent land quality map to which we were referred shows how
small an area would be available and mostly close to the coast.
So we are talking not about all of Queensland & the NT but areas
smaller than NSW.

My thoughts together with the thoughts of others shows that it might
well be a much smaller project than many expected.

Ludwig, Divergence, Bazz. Very interesting and studied comments, including Rhrosty and Grumblers sceptical comment on government 'picking winners'. This is a conversation essential to the development of the proposed 'white' paper, a conversation and a time frame essential to the development of good policy. Examples of 'special economic zones' developed in various places throughout the world example both successes and failures.

It is good to see, finally, the potential development of policy that is not the result of a 'thought bubble' to catch the 24 hour news cycle or the 'back of a beer coaster' economics of policy development. Who knows, with a competent government with demonstrated economic management history, we may even see a cost benefited analysis included in the process.

I have hopefull expectations of a potential 'snowy river' nation changeing proposal here.

Hopefully we can bypass the 'junk science' input of the the likes of WWF and Greenpeace etc etc.

It is the likes of these NGO's that rubbish the concept of 'sustainability' as used by Ludwig etc.

Learned Friends. Define sustainabiity!
My definition , for what it's worth, is " I've got mine, stuff you Jack".
This blinkered vision will ensure urbanities decide the fate of what fellow investors sow. This will then be exposed to the whims of a Four Corners expose!

Carnivore, the answer to your question is simple.

Sustainability is what occurs in a zero growth economy.

Many people give more complicated explanations but when you crunch all
of them to the fundamental the energy requirement forces the economy
into zero growth.

If an Abbott government can develop policies to encourage a significant agriculture industry in northern Australia to export to emerging markets in Asia that is a good thing.
If however it is to waste billions on white elephants (to join the long list of these in northern Australia like the Alice Springs to Darwin railway) and put even more public servants in Darwin, then forget it.

Anthony P,
How a rail line from Alice to Darwin can be called a folly is beyond me. As for visions of of a northern food bowl, I'd like to draw attention to the australian mentality towards foresight. The Snowy scheme, Lake Argyle, the pipe lines in W.A. come to mind, why even the Opera House. All these were victims of the australian mentality of short-sightedness but look at these projects now. The food bowl vision is no different. The problem with the australian mentality is that they can't wait for profit to materialise. They have an idea in the morning & if they haven't made a profit by lunch time they see it as a failure yet with Rudd/Gillard & Co & the Goaf they watched mismanagement for years without a blink of the eye. Some mentality indeed !

<< If an Abbott government can develop policies to encourage a significant agriculture industry in northern Australia to export to emerging markets in Asia that is a good thing. >>

Hold AnthonyP, it is nowhere near that simple.

It needs a thorough cost/benefit analysis, and if the benefits don’t come out well ahead of the costs, and that means a conservative estimate of ALL the costs in the long term, then we should forget it.

We also need to be very aware that billions would need to be spent up front before we really start to see a return. And with an ever-greater demand for public money elsewhere, in just about every sector of society, this could be highly problematic.

Ludwig,
with the sort of money you're talking I'd much rather have a conservative Govt investing it than an ALP Govt blowing it.