Australia’s real carrying capacity
Stripped of all the manipulation of figures, the situation is that there is very large unused water capacity in Australia and also a very large amount of land that could be properly irrigated without environmental damage, as long as careful, modern and conservative irrigation methods are practiced.
The late Jack Kelly, an important economist who assisted in the establishment of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, was critical of many, initially faultily conceived, northern development schemes. Kelly knew an enormous amount about practical irrigation, and also about the economics of irrigation, agriculture and pastoralism.
He made a study of the Kimberleys in north-western Australia and of the Northern Territory in the 1960s. He was sceptical about the Ord River Dam because it was in his view on too large a scale, and in the wrong place.
In his useful book, Struggle for the North (Australasian Book Society, 1966), he located about 50 possible places for smaller dams that could supply water for assorted agricultural activities, irrigation agriculture and livestock uses. Jack Kelly had a particular objection to the way that the big pastoral companies, particularly the foreign-owned ones, such as Vesteys, had locked up control of the strategic riverfront grazing lands for extremely nominal rentals, and the way this monopoly control of the strategically placed holdings held back useful agricultural development.
He favoured small-scale, local, individually owned pastoral and agricultural developments, and his book is an eloquent plea in favour of such developments, and a specific blueprint for where they would be possible. Another major set of proposals for Australian development, the longstanding Bradfield-Ion Idriess schemes for Queensland rivers, are from a technical and engineering point of view, quite feasible.
A number of the technical problems inherent in such schemes were solved during the development of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and these days most such major infrastructure projects are technically feasible.
Obviously what would be required for any of these important development projects would be labour and credit and, as many people know, in conditions of national emergency, credit can be created by government, as it was during the Second World War, despite the avaricious way global finance capital attempts to preserve for itself alone the right to create credit.
There are enormous technical and practical problems in such agricultural and infrastructure development, but none of them are insuperable. For instance, the problem of salination is a question of drainage, and of selecting suitable land for irrigation instead of land in which there are already large amounts of salt at certain levels. (Often because this land consists of ancient seabeds.)
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One innovative solution to some salination might be Israeli-type tapping of the ground water below the salt for irrigation, thereby lowering the water table. The question of markets for the food will be solved in the medium term by the inevitably increasing shortage of food on a global scale.
Already, the very important project of the railway through western Victoria, NSW and western Queensland to Darwin, and the other Adelaide-Darwin project, and a Wyndham-Derby-Darwin rail project, which could easily be devised, could create a satisfactory transport framework for food exports to our potential Asian markets.
None of these tasks are technically impossible. The real problem is finding the proper balance between these necessary projects and the equally necessary dimension of preserving the natural environment in an appropriate way.
In my view it would be possible to develop a gigantic agricultural program of this sort, at the same time as withdrawing a great deal of unsuitable land from scrubby pastoralism and marginal agriculture. (The land withdrawn could be turned into national parks.)
The agricultural future of Australia lies in developing large-scale, carefully designed, ecologically sustainable irrigation agriculture, rather than speculative pastoralism and marginal agriculture on semi-arid lands. Looked at in the framework of appropriate, intensive Australian agricultural development in the future, the proposition that we could not feed many more people is thoroughly unsound.
A recent issue of The Australian has a fascinating article about local proposals in the Bowen area of north Queensland to develop infrastructure, dam several rivers and commence a new major irrigation area, which is strongly supported by the whole local community. Similar projects are possible in many parts of northern Australia.
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