Foxy the "experts" also told us it would never rain again, or at least not enough to fill the dams, due to their obsession with the global warming myth.

That was of course just before half the country disappeared under flood water.

Please don't believe those self appointed experts. They would be a joke, if not so dangerous when their daydreams & fantasies are believed.

We will have stopped wasting precious recourses on sending rather dumb kids to university, & will be back to putting them to work much younger.

We will have woken up to the foolishness of alternative power generation, & have coal fired power giving us our natural advantage again.

We will be exporting much more uranium, but as processed fuel if we become half smart, & perhaps even using some of it ourselves.

We will be harvesting all that oil under the southern barrier reef.

We will have stopped immigration because If we don't, very soon we will be in a Lebanese type civil war long before most of the above has happened.

Bazz I hope you are right, but I started thinking about breeding working horses back in the 70s, when they told me the same thing. Ships will simply move to nuclear power, as developed & proven by the US navy. Land transport will be powered by electricity & methane, with clathrate vacuumed from the deep ocean, & extracted from the tundra.

Fox, "Reduction of our water resources, will reduce our food growth, how will we feed the population? Are we going to import water?"

As a reminder, you are the poster who maintains that Australia is a 'wealthy country' that should open its doors to those millions of economic migrants.

We have the bogan element to thank. The Global Financial Heist ran through the Northern Hemisphere like a sustained blizzard. Thanks to urgent action by the Rudd-Gillard government the GFH was sidelined from Australia. Instead of lending a hand for Australia, all the Abbott-Murdoch Opposition did was carp, demanding we expose Australia to the same GFH blizzard that the global corporations were inflicting. It was pretty obvious they'd bring it to Australia if they could lie their way into office. Sure enough, a torrent of abuse from the Abbott-Hockey mafia, News Ltd and the likes of Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt fooled enough bogans into swinging their votes to Abbott to strip Australia's protection from the backwash of the GFH and bring it storming into our country in the form (inter alia) of two disastrous budgets and a host of administrative cuts to public welfare.

It would have been much worse had the Senate not been able to moderate the attack - for which a head of steam is being built up to nobble the Senate voting system to tame it. Part way to Ken Livingstone's prediction: "If voting changed anything they'd abolish it".

To stop the Tea Party wing of the Corportate and Squatters' Parties imposing a future like that of Greece or worse, the most immediate response needed is to prise the group out of office at the next election.

Foxy, there's plenty of water, but most of it's in Northern Australia. There's also plenty of scope for making better use of the water we have in southern Australia, and in the future desalination is likely to be much cheaper than it now is, and dehumidification may also become a viable water source in some areas.

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Hasbeen, the claim that the experts told us "it would never rain again" was merely sloppy reporting by the Murdoch press. It misrepresents their position in two ways:
Firstly, they said "could" rather than would.
Secondly the timeframe they warned us about wasn't for ever; it was until after the dams are empty.
Without the benefit of hindsight, it would've been irresponsible not to take those concerns seriously.

BTW after a Google search, I'm presuming that by "southern barrier reef" you mean the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef. But as far as we know, there is no oil under any part of the Great Barrier Reef. Geologically it's thought to be too young.

Dear Hasbeen,

Australia is one of the standout countries in terms
of human development status.
It is not corrupt. It's science is
world class. However none of this matters
if governments are
not prepared to listen to the scientists or think that
science is a "load of crap."

The earlier website that I cited earlier makes it quite
clear that our rate of productivity is dependant on increasing
our labour force participation - facilitated by education and
health programs and increased participation by people over
65. Managing an ageing population is not going to be easy -
as we know.

However the Australian 2050 Project for the Australian Academy of
Science has, we're told, just published Phase I - which
according to the earlier link is called -
"Negotiating Our Future: Living Scenarios for Australia to 2050"
We're told that this -
"emerged from 35 scientists working together to explore
social perspectives, resilience, scenarios, and modelling as
pathways towards environmentally and economically sustainable
and socially equitable ways of living."

It sounds impressive and if you're interested -
is available for free from:

http://www.science.org.au/publications/australia-2050

Thank You for the additional contributions to this
discussion.

Our future as I mentioned in my opening post does
depend on decisions made today and that means it is
important to get some early insights into what our
alternatives and choices are.

Please keep your comments and ideas coming.
They will be gratefully received.