Has any one considered how the city of Kalgoorlie gets its water
Belly,
excellent point ! Imagine Kalgoorlie drug dealers & brothels short on water. Unthinkable ;-)

Look at the world and think - is this how it must be?
Saltpetre,
Very profound & let's hope it makes some take stock of themselves !

Saltpetre,
Despite being pro free trade, I'm certainly not a neoliberal. Indeed I oppose neoliberalism.
Economics is something that can and should be controlled to keep the nation productive.

BTW your strawman rant would have been ineffective against neoliberals, because it makes you look like a conspiracy nut.

OF COURSE WE MUST DO WHAT IS RIGHT FOR THE FUTURE. And there is much we could and should do to develop inland Australia, starting with sealing the Birdsville Track. But trying to massively expand irrigation agriculture in the absence of strong demand is wrong for the future. It may even damage our future ability to react to the demand when it eventually comes.

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individual
>Cyclonic weather wipes out any produce.
Yet there's still a lot of farming in the more cyclone prone areas along the East Coast.

Dear individual,

You said;

"that kind of academic logic is what didn't build the Snowy scheme"

Sorry old chap but that was exactly what did build it, not only that it took it from a simple irrigation project to a nation building hydroelectricity scheme.

Rather inconvenient I know but you can't wish the physics away.

Now do you agree with the proposition that if the costs involved in transporting this water 3000kms are greater than those of providing desalination water closer to the end use then we should be using the latter?

Look know I am not a Saint, never ever claim to be
But do we need to insult?
Is it strengthening our case
indy the water feeding what you seem to think is one big brothel is pumped a very long way, that was my point
Inland need not be Airs Rock, reusing water can begin just 50 klm from the coast

Come on kiddies, try to be practical. The amount of water pumped to Kalgoorlie, over relative flat land, no big range to cross, would be enough to irrigate perhaps 50 acres. Not enough to be noticed in the west.

How do I get the message across about availability of water. Most floods are very short duration events. You can't pump much in 3 days. Billions of gallons flow past my place in a big one. From that my neighbour with his 3 of 40 inch high flow pumps can usually not quite fill one of his 5 acre ring tanks. It takes 3 freshes in the river in a season to get both his ring tanks filled. That is 15 acre feet, enough with normal rain to irrigate 40 acres of turf, & 10 acres of sorghum forage crop.

There are no sights on coastal planes to build dams to hold large quantities of water, & you can't pump it anywhere once it is in the ocean.

Individual I have lived through many cyclones, about 6 in the Whitsundays alone. Only one of these did any real agricultural damage. It wasn't even a very big or dangerous one, but stalled nearby. The resulting heavy rain caused flooding, which did damage some cane crops.

I realise some crops, like bananas are severely damaged by strong winds. But such storms are rare. Cyclone Ada was 1970 was very damaging. It was 47 years before another very damaging one hit the area. In fact cyclones do less crop damage overall, than do the hail storms further south so recently in the news.

Aidan, do some research & you will find maps of the strata that brings New Guinea water under Torres straight, & back up in the artesian basin. Much of what we are using has over a million years underground, & came from PNG.