Northern Rivers need urgent protection

In January 2007, the former Prime Minister, John Howard, established a taskforce to examine land and water development in northern Australia. This was the culmination of an orchestrated campaign by some loud voices to move Australian agriculture out of the dying dustbowl of the Murray Darling Basin and into the fragile and wild environments of the north.

The highest profile supporter of this scheme was the Liberal Party’s outspoken and controversial Senator Bill Heffernan. For his efforts Heffernan was made the head of the taskforce. Within days Heffernan confirmed the worst fears of environment groups by claiming that northern Australia would become the “next food basket for Asia” and that “rice and cotton growers and Asian investors were already lining up to be part of any northern development”. (Courier-Mail, 12/02/07).

What Heffernan and others didn’t talk about was the development of Northern Australia as the ‘new agricultural frontier’ and ‘new food bowl of the world’ would necessitate the construction of expensive and destructive water infrastructure projects including dams, weirs and levees. It would also mean the extraction of massive amounts of water from wild rivers and the clearing of immense areas of forests, woodlands and natural grasslands.

Although the Howard Government is now history, the new Rudd Labor Government has decided to keep the Northern taskforce although with changed membership and changed terms of reference so we need to be vigilant.

Proposals to tame the wild rivers of Northern Australia to create a new agricultural region have been on the books for at least 60 years. These plans are foolhardy at best with a range of major problems including enormous environmental impacts, the low productivity of ancient soils, high evaporation rates and the extreme variability of the climate – the amount of wet season rain is unpredictable and while water flows are abundant from December to February, there’s a period of up to a nine months every year where literally no rain falls at all.

The rich marine life of the Northern Australia fisheries would also be devastated by the changes to water flows and water quality that would accompany the introduction of broad acre cropping and irrigation.

Ian Lancaster heads the North Australian Irrigation Futures project, a national research program. Mr. Lancaster told ABC radio last year that, “Northern Australia is a difficult place to do anything with generally weak soils, aggressive wildlife and extreme weather conditions on a scale beyond what most Australians had experienced. We more or less live in a desert that just pours with rain for three months of the year. There are some good soils in particular areas. But they get leached heavily every year because of the intense rainfall, because the soil structure is very poor."

Supporters of northern agriculture argue that the Ord River irrigation scheme in the eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia highlights the potential for irrigated agriculture in the region.

However these advocates fail to mention that $500,000,000 of public funding has been expended so far over the 40 year life of the scheme to irrigate a tiny 11,500 hectares of land. Advocates also fail to discuss the 300,000 hectare rice development during the 1950s at Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory that was destroyed by a combination of wild buffaloes, rats, birds and salinity.

The Wilderness Society is opposed to the development of large scale irrigated agriculture in Northern Australia. We believe that moving irrigated agricultural development into Northern Australia will be an unmitigated disaster both for the environment and economically and is likely to repeat the mistakes of southern Australia.

Australia does not need, and cannot afford, more costly agricultural disasters in Northern Australia. What we do need is a long term plan to protect and conserve our great and iconic Northern Rivers.

Rather than destroying our Northern wild rivers, the Wilderness Society is seeking the protection of our Northern Rivers based on a model of protection developed in Queensland through the Queensland Government’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. We have already succeeded in the protection of 6 wild rivers in Queensland with another 13 rivers proposed for protection on Cape York.

Furthermore in late 2007, TWS together with local environment groups convinced the Northern Territory Government to maintain a ban on the extraction of water and landclearing in the Daly River south of Darwin. The Daly is one the Territories most important rivers and must be protected.