Warwick Lorenz is Managing Director of Australian Pump Industries and a veteran of the water industry. He occasionally writes for various magazines.
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Drought-Proofing a Sunburnt Country
Warwick Lorenz
Australian Poet and Fiction Writer Dorothea McKellar’s vision for Australia is still waiting to be realised. But where will all the water come from?
The mighty Ord River Dam, in The Kimberley north-east, where huge volumes of water are poured into the sea every day.
As we make our way through this third decade of the third millennium, Australians are confronted with the challenge of sustaining our world-class lifestyle in the face of unprecedented threats to our national security. Various geopolitical, public health, and socio-economic forces are now converging while most of the international scientific community describes climate change as out of our control.
Our resilient farmers survived a horrific record 6-year drought to be rewarded, serendipitously, with a glut of rain in 2020 and 2021. Consequently, our stewards of the land are currently enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity. To depend on the right climate at the right time, however, is a fragile strategy fraught with risk, as any Australian farmer will tell you. The only sustainability that counts in this country is water security.
Time to drought-proof Regional Australia
Despite personally advocating for it for a long time, the plan to drought-proof the inland of Australia is not new, in fact. John Bradfield CGM (1887-1943), the eminent Australian civil engineer who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge nearly a century ago, came up with a plan in the 1930s to turn rivers in Queensland and New South Wales backwards to feed the thirsty inland.
A few years later, towards the end of the World War II, and prior to becoming a journalist for the Truth and Daily Mirror publications in the 1950s, Leslie Henry Luscombe started promoting the same idea. His 177-page book, “Australia Replanned”, was published in 1945, though it was written in 1944 before the war had ended. His map, drawn by hydrologists at the time, showed how rainfall could be captured and stored for the “six lean years” to come.
Luscombe put forward the proposition of what a country of a mere seven or so million people able to put that huge an effort into the war should be capable of doing with the opportunities afforded by this vast island continent. He suggested our number one priority is water supply to the inland – such as dams and channels, similar to the Snowy River Scheme that was eventually constructed between 1949 and 1974.
: L.H. Luscombe’s map showing his dream, 82 years ago, of a vast inland sea. Wouldn’t it be great to build up our water storage and to refill the Great Australian Artesian Basin every year, instead of once every 6 years?
In my humble opinion, credit should go to Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott, who as then Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister of the country, later had a similar vision called the “Hundred Dams Project” in 2013. They realised that with much of our wealth being generated by farmers, regional Australia’s water security was a great opportunity to enlarge and grow the sector. The idea was to turn Bradfield and Luscombe’s dreams into reality albeit three-quarters of a century later. They argued that improved water supply to the agricultural sector could mean , Australia producing not just four times more food and fibre that we can consume ourselves but perhaps even 20 times that amount.
The idea of simply channelling water from Northern Australia, where it is abundant, to southern areas of the country that need it seems logical enough and technically feasible – at least in theory. This possible solution is, however, affected by a number of converging forces and therefore causing enormous complexity – social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. Hence, easier said than done.
Has anyone ever considered measuring the actual potential of a water transfer strategy, beginning with the question of “how much surplus water is there in cubic feet in Australia’s North?” and “what logistics are involved in bringing it south, where to, and to what benefit? “Interior rejuvenation” through the mass hydration of regional Australia, an “anti-desertification move”, ought be on the national agenda. Other parts of the world, including the Middle-East and Africa, are now engaging in this practice, especially if there are good water reserves in one part of said country.
The proposed Hells Gate Dam on the Burdekin River in northern Queensland, a transformational project for the region, could be a great start. Investing in the channels to get the water spread in a wide enough area to turn more land into quality high value cropping, however, should not be overlooked. Certainly, a project of this nature, which has attracted an historic AUD5.4 billion funding package from the Federal Government, has great potential to improve the “drought proofing” of regional Australia as largely serviced by the Murray Darling river system.
Nationally recognised water specialists like Simon Cowland-Cooper, a recent Order of Australia award recipient for his services to the irrigation industry, have ideas that are worth considering. Simon advocates that the Mount Foxton Dam proposal is another possible way of offering greater water security to both the eastern and western regions of the Great Dividing Range without the use of tunnels, pipelines or pumping units. This is achieved by substituting the proposed Hells Gate Dam with a far more appropriate structure 30 kilometres downstream to the Gorge situated Mt Foxton. At this location, a dam will be far higher than the Hells Gate Dam having an RL[1] 380 which will be able to provide two discharge gravity outlets to service both the East (RL 300) and West (RL 350) riverbed sides of the Range.
For the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australia’s next 5 to 10 year crippling drought is surely not a matter of if but when. While there are drip-feed improvements in attitudes happening and plenty of people with good opinions worth listening to on this nationally important commodity, what’s really needed is a tsunami of orchestrated action before it’s too late.
[1]
Relative Level Above Sea Level.
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In 2016 I published a blog article titled Moonshots for Australia: 7 For Now. It’s one of many I have posted on business and innovation in Australia. In that book, I highlighted a number of Industries of the Future among a number of proposed Moonshots. I self-published a book, Innovation in Australia – Creating prosperity for future generations, in 2019, with a follow-up COVID edition in 2020. There is no doubt COVID is causing massive disruption. Prior to COVID, there was little conversation about National Sovereignty or supply chains. Even now, these topics are fading, and we remain preoccupied with productivity and jobs! My motivation for this writing has been the absence of a coherent narrative for Australia’s business future. Over the past six years, little has changed. The Australian ‘psyche’ regarding our political and business systems is programmed to avoid taking a long-term perspective. The short-term nature of Government (3 to 4-year terms), the short-term horizon of the business system (driven by shareholder value), the media culture (infotainment and ‘gotcha’ games), the general Australian population’s cynical perspective and a preoccupation with a lifestyle all create a malaise of strategic thinking and conversation. Ultimately, it leads to a leadership vacuum at all levels. In recent years we have seen the leadership of some of our significant institutions failing to live up to the most basic standards, with Royal Commissions, Inquiries and investigations consuming excessive time and resources. · Catholic Church and other religious bodies · Trade Unions · Banks (and businesses generally, take casinos, for example) · the Australian Defence Force · the Australian cricket teams · our elected representatives and the staff of Parliament House As they say, “A fish rots from the head!” At best, the leadership behaviour in those institutions could be described as unethical and, at worst….just bankrupt! In the last decade, politicians have led us through a game of “leadership by musical chairs” – although, for now, it has stabilised. However, there is still an absence of a coherent narrative about business and wealth creation. It is a challenge. One attempt to provide such a narrative has been the Intergenerational Reports produced by our federal Government every few years since 2002. The shortcomings of the latest Intergenerational Report Each Intergenerational Report examines the long-term sustainability of current government policies and how demographic, technological, and other structural trends may affect the economy and the budget over the next 40 years. The fifth and most recent Intergenerational Report released in 2021 (preceded by Reports in 2002, 2007, 2010 and 2015) provides a narrative about Australia’s future – in essence, it is an extension of the status quo. The Report also highlights three key insights: 1. First, our population is growing slower and ageing faster than expected. 2. The Australian economy will continue to grow, but slower than previously thought. 3. While Australia’s debt is sustainable and low by international standards, the ageing of our population will pressure revenue and expenditure. However, its release came and went with a whimper. The recent Summit on (what was it, Jobs and Skills and productivity?) also seems to have made the difference of a ‘snowflake’ in hell in terms of identifying our long-term challenges and growth industries. Let’s look back to see how we got here and what we can learn. Australia over the last 40 years During Australia’s last period of significant economic reform (the late 1980s and early 1990s), there was a positive attempt at building an inclusive national narrative between Government and business. Multiple documents were published, including: · Australia Reconstructed (1987) – ACTU · Enterprise Bargaining a Better Way of Working (1989) – Business Council of Australia · Innovation in Australia (1991) – Boston Consulting Group · Australia 2010: Creating the Future Australia (1993) – Business Council of Australia · and others. There were workshops, consultations with industry leaders, and conferences across industries to pursue a national microeconomic reform agenda. Remember these concepts? · global competitiveness · benchmarking · best practice · award restructuring and enterprising bargaining · training, management education and multiskilling. This agenda was at the heart of the business conversation. During that time, the Government encouraged high levels of engagement with stakeholders. As a result, I worked with a small group of training professionals to contribute to the debate. Our contribution included events and publications over several years, including What Dawkins, Kelty and Howard All Agree On – Human Resources Strategies for Our Nation (published by the Australian Institute of Training and Development). Unfortunately, these long-term strategic discussions are nowhere near as prevalent among Government and industry today. The 1980s and 1990s were a time of radical change in Australia. It included: · floating the $A · deregulation · award restructuring · lowering/abolishing tariffs · Corporatisation and Commercialisation Ross Garnaut posits that the reforms enabled Australia to lead the developed world in productivity growth – given that it had spent most of the 20th century at the bottom of the developed country league table. However, in his work, The Great Reset, Garnaut says that over the next 20 years, our growth was attributable to the China mining boom, and from there, we settled into “The DOG days” – Australia moved to the back of a slow-moving pack! One unintended consequence of opening our economy to the world is the emasculation of the Australian manufacturing base. The manic pursuit of increased efficiency, lower costs, and shareholder value meant much of the labour-intensive work was outsourced. Manufacturing is now less than 6% of our GDP , less than half of what it was 30 years ago!
