Australia21 will
host a roundtable in February 2013 on the benefits and feasibility of a large
national program to ‘regreen Australia’ through massive reforestation and
revegetation.
The project will re-examine the issues raised in a 1989 CSIRO report - Regreening Australia: The environmental,
economic and social benefits of reforestation
by Australia21 director Richard Eckersley - in the light of advances
in knowledge about both the problems and the solutions. Key among these is the
growing understanding of the impacts of climate change on Australian
environments and the importance of land use and land cover in addressing
climate change.
Initial feedback on
the proposal from a range of scientific and policy experts has been positive.
There was general agreement that, while there has been a substantial increase
in funding for relevant environmental activities since 1989, these efforts still
lack the necessary scale, integration and prioritisation to address the
environmental challenges Australia faces. Participants in the roundtable
will examine the following central question: ‘What are the benefits of
large-scale reforestation and revegetation, and how can they best be
achieved?’
Subsidiary
questions include:
- What
is already being done, and is it enough?
-What have we learned from past
reforestation/revegetation programs?
-What
remains to be learned?
-What
are the best processes and mechanisms for assessing risks and achieving
benefits?
-Who
are the key partners/stakeholders and what are their roles?
-Are
priorities at local, regional and national scales agreed and compatible?
-What
are the next steps?
A two-page summary of the 1989 report which
provides background is available here.
Enough funding to kick start the project has been provided by Richard Eckersley, through a bequest from the estate of the late
Jan Lee Martin, and the Natural Resources Conservation League of
Victoria. Australia21 is seeking more funding to ensure the best
possible outcome. If you would like to comment on this project or you
would like to know more please contact us at office@australia21.org.au. Donations to support
Regreening Australia can be made on line http://www.givenow.com.au/australia21.
Driving home this afternoon I heard part of ABC Radio
National’s Australia Talks, on the
subject of that great Australian summer holiday ritual, the drive to wherever
the Christmas-New Year holiday is to be spent.
The consensus was that, in spite of the vast improvement in
our roads, modern, time-poor city folks don’t want to spend more than about
three hours in the car to get to where they are going. This caused me to reflect on the summer
holiday drives of my childhood and youth.
I grew up in Armidale and from 1948 until I left home at the
end of university in 1966 we went every year to Port Macquarie for three weeks
from a few days before Christmas until the first week in January. The drive was
quite a business – in those days the New England Tablelands were very isolated
by the bad roads which lay in every direction, including, I can dimly remember,
the New England Highway to Sydney having eighty miles of unsealed road between
Tamworth and Singleton. Those were the
days when you had to book ahead to get a seat on the train.
There were three possible ways of driving to Port
Macquarie. The most direct route was via
Kempsey, down the road through Bellbrook.
I don’t actually know anyone who went that way, although I have seen
photos taken on that road before the Second World War by an Armidale Greek
family. In the post-war years it was
definitely 4WD territory, but even then it was not always passable. I travelled some way along it a few times in
my early secondary school days when an American student at UNE (David Werner, inevitably
known as “Hank the Yank”) used to invite me to accompany him in his searches for
specimens in the rain forest at the edge of the escarpment. Stunning scenery, and the leeches were friendly, but the road
was definitely not in good shape.
The road of choice in those early years (late 1940s to
mid-1950s) was the Oxley Highway, a 158 mile journey that included 108 miles of
unsealed road between the outskirts of Walcha and the entrance to Wauchope. This included a stretch of narrow winding
road that wound its way down the mountain through state forest from which timber
(the last of the cedar, I fancy) was being harvested, so one would inevitably
come up behind a timber jinker and eat its dust for the rest of the journey,
there being no possibility of passing it. The 158 mile journey typically took
about eight hours in our 1948 Ford Anglia tourer, and one arrived caked with
dust.
So when some time in the late 1950s the road to Dorrigo was
sealed, it was no contest. The journey via Dorrigo and Bellingen, picking up
the Pacific Highway at Urunga, was a longer journey, but faster, safer and
definitely cleaner. And by that time we had graduated to an Austin A40, which
at least nominally kept the dust out.
Now the roads are all sealed and Google Maps tells me that
the journey time from Armidale to Port Macquarie (247km via the Oxley Highway)
takes 3 hours and 14 minutes.
Nevertheless, it was exciting doing it the hard way in the
little old car, to end the day lying in bed at the Beach Park Holiday Cabins with
the sound of the surf crashing onto Flynn’s beach just a couple of hundred
yards away.
This is a photo of a scheduled passenger aircraft arriving in Armidale in about 1958, evidently for the start of term.
Note the NEGS uniforms of the day. Note the Akubra on the TAS boy just to the right of the fuselage – we were never to be seen outside the school grounds without it.
Received today from Burnet’s Books of Uralla, a town about 20 km south of Armidale in the New England region of New South Wales, three interesting memorabilia from the New England University College and the University of New England:
-New England University College Calendar 1947-48, 24 pages (Armidale Express print): a memento of the immediate postwar period, when the University College was beginning to grow after its very fragile start in 1938 and a very lean time during the war years.
-University of New England Handbook, November 1954 (Armidale Express print): published the first year of the University’s existence as an autonomous institution.
-The University of New England Calendar, 1962 (printed by Halstead Press, Sydney, published by the University on 1 November 1961, the end of my first year at the University, by which time the University had grown to about 600 full-time undergraduates). This document combined in one volume the University Calendar last published in 1956, and the annual University Handbook.
These documents are a little treasure trove of information about the staff who participated in the great experiment that was Australia’s first regional university.In future posts I will draw on them to recall a little of the University’s history and the way things were.
The New England University College (NEUC) of the University of Sydney opened its doors to students in 1938. The following year it fielded its first rugby union team in the New England Zone Rugby Union Competition:
Back Row: Lewis Border, Consett Davis, Max Hartwell, John Rafferty, Jim Belshaw (Coach), Alf Maiden, Les Titterton, Frank Rickwood, Ken James
Middle Row: Ralph Crossley, Paul Barratt, Pat Thompson, Alan Sutherland, Peter Durie
Front Row: Ed Scalley, Harry Savage
Some notes on the players:
Lewis Border:
Like my father, Lewis Harold Border, born at Bundarra NSW on 16 April 1920, was an old boy of The Armidale School (1934-37) and the son of an Anglican clergyman, the Ven Archdeacon H. Border, of Gunnedah. When the University College opened Border, Ken James (see below) and my father shared a room in Booloominbah.
He joined the Army on 22 August 1942 and was discharged on 20 April 1945, at the rank of Bombardier, his posting at discharge being with the 14th Australian Infantry Training Battalion (see his service record here).
Border joined the Department of External Affairs and after a couple of postings in Washington in the 1950s was Australian Ambassador to Burma (1963-65) and then to South Vietnam in the late 1960s.
In the early 1970s, as a Deputy Secretary in the Department of Foreign Affairs, he chaired an interdepartmental committee on which I was one of the Treasury representatives – a committee which worked over about a twelve month period to settle Australia’s policy positions for the Preparatory Conference for a major overhaul of the Law of the Sea.
Consett Davis (1913-44)
H.F. Consett Davis, after whom the UNE playing fields are named, was the foundation lecturer in Botany and Zoology, joining the staff in March 1939.
He was born in Sydney on 23 June 1915. He had been a brilliant student, taking First Class Honours in both Botany and Zoology at Sydney University. When war broke out he first joined the Royal Australian Air Force. His service record (see here) shows his date and locality of enlistment as unknown, and gives his date of discharge as 25 October 1940, at which stage he had the rank of Pilot Officer. Another service record (see here) shows that he joined the Army on 3 December 1941, the eve of Pearl Harbour, and was discharged from the 2/7 Division Cavalry Regiment 1 May 1944 with the rank of Lance Corporal.
A third service record (see here) shows him as having rejoined the Army on 26 June 1944, presumably after some period of training or briefing, and having served until his death in an air crash in New Guinea on 11 December 1944, at which time he was a Lieutenant in the 1st Australian Army Tropical Research Section.
Of his academic work, a paper on Hymenopterous Parasites of Embioptera read by Alan P. Dodd on 26 July 1939 (see here) contains a couple of references to specimens being returned to Consett Davis. There is another reference to him in a paper, The Sydney ornithological fraternity, 1930s-1950: anecdotes of an admirer, by Allen Keast, Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (see here).
His widow Gwenda succeeded him on the University staff. She joined the staff of NEUC in 1945 as a plant taxonomist, and like him initially taught both botany and zoology. As the University developed she played a major role in setting up the Botany Department. She was still on the staff when I was at UNE in the 1960s. A brief biographical note on her can be found here.
Max Hartwell
Max Hartwell was born at Red Range NSW on 11 February 1921. His Army service record (see here) shows him as having joined the Army at Glen Innes on 16 December 1942 and being discharged on 23 January 1942, as a private soldier in the Sydney University Regiment. I have no background on this but given his subsequent career it is reasonable to suppose that when the University Regiments were disbanded after Pearl Harbour someone found a better way for him to contribute to the war effort than slogging away in the infantry.
When Max Hartwell died on 24 March 2009, blogger Robert Higgs had this to say about him (here)
A native of Australia, Max enjoyed a long, eventful life. Born and reared in the outback of New South Wales, he progressed to teacher training, school teaching, service in the army during the war, graduate training, and a life of productive scholarship in England and the United States. He was an outstanding economic historian and contributed greatly to the “Standard of Living Debate,” defending the view that the Industrial Revolution, far from having been a Marxist nightmare for the working class, was the means by which they were gradually lifted from the poverty that had been their lot from time immemorial. Max spent the heart of his career at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he trained a number of outstanding economic historians. Later, after his retirement from Oxford, he alternated between teaching at the University of Virginia and teaching at the University of Chicago.
John Rafferty
John Rafferty would appear to have been a local, the son of Second Lieutenant Arthur John Rafferty, Chemist of Beardy Street Armidale, who enlisted in the Army on 16 February 1915, sailed out of Melbourne on the troop transport Ceramic on 25 June 1915, and returned to Australia on 26 September 1917 (see here).
There is a service record (see here) for Arthur John Rafferty, born in Armidale on 24 August 1920, who joined the Army at Kempsey on 7 September 1942 and gave his next of kin as A. Rafferty. He was discharged with the rank of Lieutenant on 16 April 1946, his posting on discharge being with the 2nd New Guinea Infantry Battalion.
I have no further information about him. Would anyone with information about John Rafferty please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Jim Belshaw
J.P. (“Jim” or “Jimmy”) Belshaw was born in Christchurch on 23 January 1908. He was one of the University College’s foundation staff members, the first to take up duty, becoming the lecturer in History and Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Economics (each of the foundation staff had to teach two subjects). He was the first President of the fledgling Union, and Deputy Warden in the early days. Being a New Zealander, he was clearly the best person to coach the rugby union team.
In due course Jim married Edna Drummond, the University College’s first librarian, daughter of D.H. Drummond who as State local member and Minister for education had played a critical role in gaining the support of State Cabinet for the establishment in Armidale of a college of the University of Sydney (for Drummond’s role see Booloominbah).
Service records show (see here) that Jim joined the Army (presumably the Sydney University Regiment) in Armidale on 23 September 1941, and was discharged with the rank of Private on 30 September 1945, his posting on discharge being 3 Battalion, Volunteer Defence Corps (Part Time Duty).
Upon the University becoming an autonomous institution in 1954, Jim Belshaw became the first Professor of Economics. I think I probably attended his Inaugural Lecture, which would have been given in the Teachers’ College Auditorium. My parents were meticulous in attending all of the Inaugural Lectures, and I went along – a very mind-broadening experience for a ten year old.
Jim Belshaw’s son James, who was a year behind me at Armidale Demonstration School and The Armidale School, runs a number of blogs concerning the New England region – see for example James Belshaw's New England Blog. At Belshaw Sans Words, a blog with pictures and few words, there is a 1944 wedding photo for the marriage of Jim Snr and Edna Drummond, and a photo of D.H. Drummond taken at tennis at Parliament House, Sydney during the 1930s.
Alf Maiden
Alfred Clement Borthwick Maiden (1922-79) was born in Taree, attended Taree High School and studied economics and history at the New England University College. He became a full-time militiaman in December 1941 and transferred to the Australian Imperial Force on 9 October 1942. His service record (here) shows that he was discharged on 4 December 1945, and that his posting on discharge was as Corporal in 555 Light Anti-Aircraft Battery.
In 1946 he joined the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) in Canberra. After two postings in Washington and a stint in the Department of Trade and Industry, he became Director of the BAE in 1959. In 1968 he resigned from the public service to become Managing Director of the International Wool Secretariat (IWS). In July 1973 he was appointed full-time chairman of the newly established Australian Wool Corporation; he also accepted appointment as Chairman of the IWS.
He was appointed CBE in 1965, and named “Man of the Year in Australian Agriculture” in 1976.
His Australian Dictionary of Biography entry may be found here.
Les Titterton
Leslie Thomas Titterton was born in Kempsey on 12 January 1920. His service record (see here) shows that he joined the Army on 29 May 1941. He was discharged on 12 February 1946, his posting on discharge being a Lieutenant in 1 Australian Movement Contingent (General Purpose).
He appears to have died on 1 December 1974 and been buried in the Dawson River (Taree) Lawn Cemetery (see here).
I have no other information about Les Titterton. Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Frank Rickwood
Frank Rickwood, the son of a newspaper editor, was born in the coalmining town of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. He took an honours degree in science, and in January 1946 became a field geologist with the Australasian Petroleum Company, for which he conducted numerous surveys in PNG.
In 1950 he became a senior lecturer in geology at Sydney University, but continued his field trips to PNG, with a particular focus on the Southern Highlands. He subsequently joined British Petroleum, and worked extensively in Latin America before pioneering the development of Alaska as a major oilfield. In 1974 he became BP’s global head of oil and gas exploration and production.
Retiring from BP in 1980, he joined the Board of Oil Search, becoming its Chairman in 1992. AT Oil Search he played a major role in promoting oil and gas exploration in PNG, an effort which led to the discovery of the Kutubu oil field in early 1986.
He was awarded an OBE by PNG, an honorary doctorate by New England University, and the first Haddon Forrester King Medal by the Australian Academy of Science.
A copy of an obituary article by Rowan Callick, published in The Australian on 23 July 2009, is on the UNE Alumni website – access it here.
Ken James
Like my father and Lewis Border, Kenneth Alfred James, born in Lismore on 12 November 1917, was an old boy of The Armidale School (1931-35), where he had been Senior Prefect, and the son of an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend G.A.G. James of Kyogle.
His service record (see here) shows that he joined the Royal Australian Air Force on 20 June 1942. His date of discharge is not known, but his final posting on discharge was as a Warrant Officer in No. 7 Operational Training Unit.
A footnote in my father’s 1993 memoir Psychology at New England states that Ken James trained in Canada, and on completion of his military service returned there and at the time of writing was resident in Vancouver.
I have no other information about Ken James. Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Ralph Crossley
Ralph George Crossley was born in Perth on 15 May 1902. He was one of the College’s five original staff members, arriving direct from Germany in April 1938 to take up his post as foundation lecturer in French and German. A conscientious and effective teacher, he was described by one of his students as “bubbling over with vim, vigour, verve and vitality”.
The National Library’s “Trove” digital archive (see here) shows that in 1939 he submitted a thesis entitled Die Kaiserchronik: ein literarhistorisches Problem der altdeutschen Literaturgeschichte , copies of which are in the libraries of the Universities of Melbourne and Tasmania.
His service record (see here) shows that he joined the Army in Armidale on 27 June 1942, and was discharged on 30 September 1945, his posting on discharge being Warrant Officer in 3 Battalion, Volunteer Defence Corps (Part Time Duty).
He later joined the German Department at the University of Sydney and was its acting head when in 1947 he was appointed Principal Instructor at the first migrant camp, at Bonegilla in Victoria, and then became the consultant on teaching techniques for the other camps (see 5 March 1948 statement by Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell here and his role in a history of the Adult Migrant Education Program here).
Paul Barratt
My father Paul Eric Hunter Barratt was born in Kalgoorlie on 23 December 1917, the son of the Canon Thomas Hunter Barratt who at that time was taking God’s word to the gold miners and the chaps laying the transcontinental railway line.
He was the first student to enrol at NEUC, indeed for a couple of days feared that he might be the only one. He completed his Sydney University Arts Degree in 1940 and went to Sydney in 1941 for his Honours year. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour the University Regiments were wound up and he went into the artillery, but he was soon called upon to assist with the establishment of the Australian Army Psychology Corps and become one of its founding members. The focus in the early days was aptitude testing to enable the armed services to put their raw recruits to best use, but as the war progressed the focus shifted to prisoner of war relief.
Towards the end of the war he was embarked on the MV Duntroon, bound for India, but Japan surrendered while they were at sea, and the ship was diverted to Singapore, arriving there the day that Mountbatten accepted the Japanese surrender. He and Madge Brown, the AGH matron on board, who also became a familiar figure around the UNE campus from the post-war years until the 1960s, were involved in the medical and psychological assessment and treatment of the prisoners in Changi Gaol and those coming down from the Burma-Thailand railway line and other camps in Southeast Asia (for some more on that see Ida Madge Brown (1904-2009)).
He returned to Armidale in 1946 as an officer with the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS), a Commonwealth funded scheme directed to the reintegration of ex-servicemen into civilian life, and a few years later took up a position as a lecturer in the Psychology Department. He retired as Professor of Psychology in 1978. His career, and some early history of the University, is documented in his Psychology at New England: an autobiographical history of the first forty years, University of New England Publishing Unit, 1993.
Pat Thompson
Patrick Thompson was born in Taree on 3 March 1920.
His service record (see here) shows that he joined the Army in Armidale on 20 April 1942, and was discharged on 23 April 1946, his posting on discharge being Private with the Northern Australia Observer Unit (NAOU – the “Nackeroos” or “Curtin’s Cowboys”). This was the unit in which the Master in Charge of Cadets at The Armidale School in my day served, and as I observed in Remembering Des Harrison, serving in this unit was not for the faint hearted. Its stock-in-trade was long-range horse-mounted patrols over a seaboard of 5500 kilometres. They were to operate in small groups, living off the land as far as possible, and operate without hope of medical assistance or casualty evacuation.
I have no other information about Pat Thompson. Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Alan Sutherland
James Alan Sutherland was born in Barraba NSW on 29 April 1912, and was one of NEUC’s foundation students.
In the University’s first year of operation in 1938 he topped the Sydney University Psychology I exams (my father came second). This gave great pleasure on the tiny campus, in view of the scepticism and outright derision accorded by many at Sydney University and in the wider Sydney community to the whole idea of setting up a “university under the gum trees”. The pleasure was renewed when Alan Sutherland and my father jointly topped Psychology II the following year and were jointly awarded a Lithgow Scholarship.
My father recounts the next step in Sutherland’s career in his memoir:
At the beginning of 1940 Alan Sutherland left the College with the intention of pursuing his study for Honours in the Psychology Department of The University of Sydney. He informed me later that he was also, at that time, trying to gain acceptance for the Navy, unsuccessfully as it transpired. He enrolled in the Third Year Honours class, which brought him into close contact with Dr A.H. Martin who was then Senior Lecturer in the Department. It was not long before there was a head-on clash of personalities, so ‘head-on’ apparently that Alan withdrew from the University and enlisted in the R.A.A.F.”
Sutherland’s service record (see here) shows that he joined the RAAF on 13 February 1941 and was discharged on 19 November 1945. His posting on discharge was Flight Lieutenant at RAAF Station Bradfield Park.
Sutherland must subsequently have completed a B.Sc. Agr. at Sydney University. He became Senior Lecturer in charge of Biological Science at Armidale Teachers’ College, then University Fellow in the Centre for Curriculum Studies, University of New England. He died in 1983.
Peter Durie
Peter Harold Durie was born in Sydney on 25 January 1920.
There are two service records. The first (here) shows that he joined the Army in Armidale on 8 August 1940, and was discharged on 8 July 1942, his posting on discharge being Gunner with the 110 Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. The second (here) shows him as having joined the RAAF on 26 April 1944, and being discharged on 12 March 1946, his posting on discharge being Flying Officer with the No. 2 Malaria Control Unit.
I remember that he came back to Armidale for a year or two after the War and was very friendly with my parents, coming often to parties they would have for a mixture of staff, students and friends at the home we rented from Don Shand at 95 Marsh Street.
He won my heart because when he was leaving town he gave me a wind-up phonograph, a portable machine for playing 78rpm records, and about half a dozen records, of which I remember in particular the 1931 recording of Gerald Adams singing “You Will Remember Vienna” from the film Viennese nights. It wasn’t the latest music but having the autonomy to play my own music at the age of five or six was really something. Then someone gave me the Orson Welles - Bing Crosby recording of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” (Part I on YouTube here) and I was in seventh heaven.
I have no information about what Peter Durie did after he left Armidale. Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Ed Scalley
Edmund St Clair Scalley was born at Abermain NSW on 24 March 1922.
There are two service records. The first (here) shows that he joined the Army at West Maitland on 19 December 1940, while based in Armidale. He was discharged on 23 May 1944, his posting on discharge being Gunner with the 224 Australian Light Anti-Aircraft Battery. The second (here) shows that he joined the RAAF the next day, 24 May 1944, and was discharged on 28 February 1945. His posting on discharge being Leading Aircraftman at No. 7 Stores Depot.
I have not been able to find anything about Ed Scalley’s subsequent career, but have found a photo of him on the Clifford/Miller Web Site on www.myheritage.com (see here).
Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Harry Savage
Henry Lewis Savage was born in Armidale on 16 June 1921. I suspect that he entered the University College in 1939 – I don’t think he was one of the original 1938 intake of about fifteen students.
His service record (here) shows that he joined the Army on 20 April 1942 and was discharged on 30 January 1946. His posting on discharge was Sergeant in the 1st Australian Prisoner of War Contact and Enquiry Unit.
After the War Harry Savage returned to his studies at NEUC, under the CRTS, became a teacher, and was Head of English at Tumut High in the 1950s when my UNE contemporaries Laurie Piper and Don Smart were there.
Harry Savage was the younger brother of Jack Savage who, with their father, had the well-known tailoring and menswear business C. Savage and Son in Beardy Street. Jack’s son John was in my class at the Armidale Demonstration School throughout my primary school days.
Harry and Jack’s second cousin Ellen is celebrated as the only nurse to survive the Japanese sinking of the Hospital Ship Centaur in 1943. Of that episode the Australian War Memorial says here:
Despite her own injuries, 30-year-old Sister Ellen Savage nursed the wounded and boosted the morale of the others. The other eleven nurses all drowned. After a day and a half adrift on life rafts, the 64 survivors were spotted by an RAAF Anson and recovered by the destroyer USSMugford.
Sister Savage’s courage was recognised by the award of the George Medal.
Ellen Savage’s service record may be found here, and an Australian War Memorial blog post on the sinking of the Centaur may be found here.
I have no other information about Harry Savage. Would anyone with information about him please post a comment or send a twitter message to @phbarratt.
Overall I think our little “university under the gum trees” even in its earliest days, with all its limitations of facilities and money, made a pretty good fist of rounding up a bunch of country kids and setting them on paths that might not otherwise have been available to them. Something to reflect upon for those who think that big is beautiful when it comes to tertiary education.
There is bound to be near-universal agreement that establishing a comprehensive plan for the management of the Murray Darling Basin is a very complex and challenging piece of public policy, the implementation of which would require political leadership of a high order. The Murray Darling Basin is the third largest river basin in the world, and by far the driest. Its waters have been substantially over-allocated, a fact that has been recognised since the early 1990s, and it has outstanding conservation values, some of which we have international obligations to protect. It plays a central role in Australian production of food and fibre, and some townships depend to an important extent upon irrigated agriculture and the maintenance and management of irrigation assets.
On a matter of such complexity and importance one might expect the responsible Minister, who at the end of the day has to take the Basin Plan to Parliament, to take a leading role in managing the politics of the issue.
Au contraire, the Murray Darling Basin Authority unveils it to a startled world late one Friday afternoon, all hell breaks loose, and The Weekend Australian for 23-24 October, under the headline Minister distances himself from Murray-Darling Basin report, quotes the Minister for Water etc., Tony Burke, as saying (see report here):
The guide is not government policy, it is not my document, I have deliberately made sure I did not launch it.
And just in case you were still in any doubt as to whether the Minister was up to the task he rushed off and sought legal advice from the Solicitor-General as to whether the Authority was giving effect to its onerous duties on a sound legal basis or whether he might have grounds to instruct the Authority to listen harder to the people making the most noise.
A Minister made of sterner stuff might have seen handling an issue of such pith and moment as a wonderful opportunity – the best opportunity he will ever get to demonstrate that he is able to deliver major reform. As it is, Tony Burke has made the Commission’s task immeasurably more difficult and signaled to the opponents of reform that the Government does not have the stomach for this fight, thereby encouraging them to mount an even more vociferous campaign, confident that it will work.
Had I been advising the Minister, I would have advised him, far from disowning the Authority’s Guide, to launch it at the opening of the business day and to set the rules of engagement for the consultation process that it is designed to set up. I would have suggested that he use the following talking points at the launch:
- We are here today to launch the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
- This Guide has been developed by the Murray Darling Basin Authority pursuant to the Water Act 2007, legislation which was introduced into Federal Parliament by the Howard Government and passed with the support of the Australian Labor Party.
- It has been developed to expose for public comment the Authority’s thinking about how it should go about its task of balancing environmental, economic and social requirements, subject to making certain necessary provision for the health of the river and its ecosystems.
- This is a very ambitious and challenging exercise. No-one has ever attempted anything like it on this scale. The Murray Darling Basin is the third largest river basin in the world, and by far the driest. It is host to unique, world class ecosystems, some of which we have international obligations to protect. At the same time, it is the source of the livelihood of many enterprises, industries and communities built around irrigated agriculture.
- It has been recognised since the early 1990s, and by many commentators before that, that the waters of the rivers in the Basin have been substantially over-allocated and that these allocations must be wound back. Winding these over-allocations back will take time and will need to be handled with sensitivity because the over-allocations have themselves been in existence for long enough to become embedded in the social and economic fabric of the Basin, and to an extent the wider Australian community.
- The Government recognises these issues but none of them can be allowed to distract the Government or the Australian public from the fact that we have to make the changes that will protect the health of the river systems upon which everyone in the Basin relies. Without healthy rivers no-one in the Basin has a long-term future.
- The Authority estimates that in order to protect the health of the river and its high value ecosystems it is necessary to reduce diversions from the river by between 3,000 and 7,600GL per annum.
- On the basis of the social and economic analysis that has already been undertaken, the Authority has assessed that any reduction of diversions greater than 4,000GL per annum would involve social and economic costs that would outweigh the additional environmental gains, and so the real focus of our attention is where in the range 3,000-4,000GL per annum the line should be drawn, the trajectory by which we get ourselves to the desired point, and the adjustment mechanisms which need to be brought into play.
- The Guide makes clear that as well as the global cuts to diversions it is necessary to distribute the reductions geographically so that additional water is available for the environmental assets at the places where it is needed. Much of this additional water has a cumulative environmental effect – the waters of the Basin have done a lot of work by the time they reach the Murray Mouth and the Coorong.
- The Authority itself recognises in the Guide that further work on the social and economic impacts needs to be undertaken, and it has already commissioned some of this. The consultation process will lead to further information and insights.
- For its part, the Government has guaranteed, and I reaffirm today, that there will be no cuts to anyone’s water entitlements – the Government will achieve the necessary reductions only by purchasing water from willing sellers. The purchases that have already taken place represent a good start on what is required.
- It is important for all participants in the consultation process to recognise that this Guide I am releasing today is not the Basin Plan, nor is it a draft of the Basin Plan. It simply sets out for public comment the current state of the Authority’s thinking about how it should go about framing the Draft Plan.
- In framing your comments, I would ask all participants to work on the basis that the feedback that will be of most interest to both the Authority and to me will be the potential impacts on the respondent of what is set out here. We want to hear from irrigators and irrigation managers how the proposals will affect them, from local government and community organizations how the proposals will affect their communities, and from other regional business people how the proposals might affect their businesses.
- If you think we have got the science wrong or the socio-economic analysis is deficient or incomplete, we will welcome your comments and take your concerns seriously, but in the interests of a constructive and civilised debate I would ask you in making your comments to bring forward the scientific evidence or socio-economic data or analysis that you find more compelling.
- I would also ask participants to remember that at the end of the day we must achieve a substantial reduction in allocations, with an appropriate geographic distribution, so please bear in mind that if you seek a lesser reduction for your enterprise or community, that may come at the cost of a greater reduction elsewhere.
- I now ask the Chairman of the Murray Darling Basin Authority to make a few remarks about the consultation processes that the Authority proposes to undertake over the weeks and months ahead.
My guess is that if the Minister had adopted something like the above approach he would now be running a manageable political process, one from which he would have prospects of emerging looking like someone who can get things done.
He chose not to go that way, and sadly my current expectation is that the failure of Murray Darling Basin reform will take its place alongside the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the Mineral Resource Super Profits Tax and the Home Insulation Program as a case study in how not to do public policy.
We are informed by The Australian Financial Review’s Chief Political Correspondent David Crowe, in today’s edition (see Turnbull back to demolish NBN on page 1), that
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has sharpened his attack on federal Labor by elevating former foe Malcolm Turnbull to the job of “demolishing” the government’s $43 billion national broadband policy, in a reshuffle that has also strengthened his focus on regional Australia.
...Mr Abbott declared that the issue would be the centre of the political battle over the next 18 months.
“I can’t think of anyone better than Malcolm Turnbull, given his experience in telecommunications and in business, to hold the government ferociously to account in this area,” Mr Abbott said.
We hear quite a lot from Mr Abbott about demolishing things, eliminating things, stopping things from happening. He is going to demolishing the national broadband network, stop the boats, stop the waste and more besides.
As he is presenting himself as the alternative Prime Minister of the country, one who in his own estimation might have to take over any day now, just as soon as the country independents come to their senses, I look forward to hearing from Mr Abbott about something he would actually like to do. What is he going to do with all that power he craves once he has got it, what is his vision for us?
We are hearing a fair bit about ferocity these days. I am not sure what happened to the “kinder, gentler polity”. Perhaps that is one more child overboard, or perhaps it is the case that an electorate that makes the wrong decision at the ballot box doesn’t deserve such a thing.
One thing that doesn’t seem to bother Mr Abbott too much is internal consistency in his approach. Mr Abbott is going to strengthen his focus on regional Australia. Tony Windsor thinks that the people of regional Australia attach great importance to high speed broadband, and as he gained an extraordinary 62% of the primary vote in New England we can assume he has some idea of what he is talking about. Mr Abbott is going to demolish the national broadband network. Figure that one out.
