AS your article included water, I insert the following into the discussion.

We need to ensure all water that can be possibly retained in the landscape is, to ensure still healthy flows, years into drought events like the current climate change related anomaly. That all irrigation be introduced via underground tapes to halve the water usage and double production areas.

Yes, I know it'll cost! But we could find billions to save the Murray/Darling! Why not the average drought-ravaged farm and or farmer!?

That we mandate on the second driest continent on earth, no effluent can be flushed to sea or into a seaward bound river system, but only ever piped inland to ground, which is at times, is below sea level, with all who want some, be able to draw an allocated share for a suitable, profit-free fee!

Further, that this scarce resource be only used on hilled ground which has biodegradable film placed on it both control weed infestation, produce an earlier harvest and eliminate as much as possible, all non-essential evaporation

. As it does all that, cost-effective farming/cropping! With the seed drilled directly into the film and in the small valleys between hilled ground, so all rain collects at the root system of the crop and not where the weeds normally predominate?

Find the money, off budget, then allow massively increased production pay for it!
Alan B.

Alan B I was going to take you to task for suggesting water saving infrastructure that would cost trillions. However I thought again and perhaps we should start attempting this anyway. If we start outwards from water courses it would start some mediation of the environment and we have to start somewhere.
I read of some adventurist in South Australia who thinking rain was coming planted wheat in the desert and made a pile. They did it the next year too. Third year climate back to normal lost their seed and walked away. Of course we need a proper BOM to assist this not some left wing glee club!
Finally plans for turning NSW and Queensland rivers inland, your opinion?

Good Idea JB and could be applied to dammed Dawson and Richmond rivers?

And would change the climate?

Moreover, some of the northern Queensland surplus, metres of annual rainfall/water could be injected by gravity into the Great Artesian Basin to transport all the way to northern S.A.

Further to that, a retired driller informed me that every other bore, around half, had to be capped due to either salt or mineral contamination, even in spite of quite healthy flows some of which used to flow quite prodigiously into the Murray.

Anyhow, these water sources could be put through deionisation dialysis desalination and used as domestic water and or in fodder sheds, what have you? Or if healthy flows are there, then as in the aforementioned underground applications for say, cotton or salt, frost and drought resistant native wisteria?

To one, grow a ready to use as is biodiesel and high protein crushed meal that outperforms grain, if used in temporary feedlot situations. Also supports fish farms, where a farm the size of Eagle Farm runway, produces more cash flow than thirty acres of grass. Ditto chicken and pork production?

Finally, we could do an inland canal from our northern W.A. and the Gulf of Carpentaria, where much of the proposed V route is already below sea level.

Therefore would not be much of an engineering challenge with cuter dredges, high-pressure water monitors and ultracheap energy. And possibly cheaper than a couple of dams that are always reliant on diminishing rainfall a far out as the eye can see!

Lake Eyre could then serve as permanently full, transport hub for fast turnaround roll on roll off shipping? And a continuous source of constantly flushed salt water which is child's play to turn into cost-effective desalinated broad scale irrigation for desert wasteland!

The key to that is Thorium and safe as houses, MSR technology couple to four times cheaper deionisation dialysis desalination. And as the crops grown with that, virtually recharge rain-bearing clouds to drop water far further inland.
Alan B.

Yes, it would cost trillions J.B!

But we have trillions in our own super funds and need only an instrument to see it invested here in failsafe income earning energy production and continuously reliable income earning potable water (95%) supply!

And doable as tax-free, government guaranteed, self-terminating, thirty-year infrastructure bonds.

Sadly, the current crowd of no-hopers and naysayers in charge are never ever going to allow it and the cooperative capitalism that would turn this nation into a single, us against the world, unit!

And predictably, a period of unprecedented prosperity that would flow from that, it would seem, given that would hurt pollie's coal-fired dividends/ambitions?

And that my friend is, I believe, far more important than real tax reform or visionary nation building or even genuine self-reliant self-defence!?

We are far more easily ruled as a nation divided against itself! Ditto the sale of our national heritage and or economic sovereignty!?
And not a vocal shot fired by our media nor serious disputation by the seriously divided rabble, on the back bench!

Royal commision into energy? Hahahahahaha!
Alan B.

Meanwhile, India, with the world's fourth largest deposits of Thorium, is building reactors to use this fuel.

Australia, with the world's largest deposits of Thorium, is apparently doing zilch.

"Meanwhile, India, with the world's fourth largest deposits of Thorium, is building reactors to use this fuel."

Yes, India has said that it'll have a small scale test thorium reactor available next year. OTOH, they've said that every year for the last decade. So far the only thing they generated is subsidies, which, I suspect, is the real aim of the project.

Still, if they do build one, that'll mean they are a mere 50 years behind the US who abandoned the concept back in the late 1960s because of all the problems it entailed.

Even so, if the Indians do build such a reactor, it merely means they are on course to have a commercial model available in 2050 which is their current projected date.

The Chinese on the other hand are projecting a commercial reactor around 2035 IF IF IF they can overcome the myriad problems they currently encounter with their testing.

Doing zilch seems to be a rational approach. Burn coal, not hot air.