Idiotic political posturing

We have been down this road before with the Ord river boondoggle in Western Australia: Lots of water was flowing out to sea in a remote area so huge dams were built at great expense to conserve the water for irrigation. Problem: There was almost nothing you could grow there that was commercially viable. Nobody seemed to notice then that the world is chronically plagued by unsellable food surpluses (owing to equally idiotic interventions by other governments) and nothing has changed since. Growing stuff does not mean you can sell it at a sustainable price. Government efforts to pick business winners are almost invariably laughable and this is no exception. If dams are to be built they should be built where there is already a demand for them. I live in a large Australian population centre that is allegedly drought stricken yet it rains here several times a week. There is NO shortage of water -- just a failure to dam it.

North Queensland could become the "food bowl of the world" under a proposal to catch thousands of gigalitres of water and irrigate vast tracts of the desolate Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York. Prime Minister John Howard yesterday appointed Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan to head a taskforce to investigate water and agriculture development in the north as part of his $10 billion national water plan. The vision is to turn the region into a garden of Eden by harnessing some of the estimated 88,000 gigalitres of water lost in run-off in north Australia each year.

With one gigalitre equal to 1000 megalitres the options are immense, Senator Heffernan told The Courier-Mail yesterday. He said the inquiry would look at harnessing the 60 per cent of Australia's total run-off that flowed through three major catchments. "This is. . . about opening up new opportunity," he said.

Peter Kenny, president of the nation's peak farmers group AgForce, said the north had the potential to become the "food bowl of the world". "There is assumption by climatologists that most of the rainfall in the future will be in the northern part of Australia," Mr Kenny said. Wilderness Society spokeswoman Larissa Cordner said: "Moving irrigated agricultural development into northern Australia will be an unmitigated disaster both for the environment and economically."

Source

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