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Whatsapp Diversion Dam on the Ord River

Both major parties have promised to invest heavily in northern Australia if they are elected on September 7. But as RN Breakfast’s environment editor Gregg Borschmann writes, experts say any plans to pursue the dream of a ‘great north Australian food bowl’ would be money poorly spent.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday announced that a Labor Government would establish a ‘Northern Special Economic Zone’ across Australia's Top End—floating a one-third cut to the company tax rate in the area and a further $10 million for the expansion of the Ord River irrigation scheme.

The plan is, at this stage, uncosted.

Professor Andrew Campbell, director of the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, is critical of the announcement. He told RN Breakfast he doesn’t believe the Ord irrigation scheme is a viable one, and that the Prime Minister’s plan won’t stand up under economic scrutiny.

‘There doesn’t seem to have been a rigorous independent benefit-cost analysis,’ Professor Campbell said from Darwin this morning.

‘Various crops in the Ord [basin] have been profitable for various periods of time when prices and seasonal conditions have been in their favour—but after 50 years and more than 60 crops, we don’t have any stand-out, large-scale, sustainable, profitable, year-in-year-out industries in the Ord, or anywhere else in the North.’

The Ord River irrigation scheme takes in several dams along the Ord River, including Australia’s largest dam, Lake Argyle, which Mr Campbell says ‘takes about an hour to fly across in a little Cessna’. Despite this, the irrigation area covers a relatively small area when compared to similar schemes in Australia’s south east.

The idea of Northern Australia being ‘the great southern food bowl for Asia’ has long been a myth, and little evidence has been provided to suggest otherwise, Mr Campbell said. The Northern Australia Land and Water Task Force also found the area unsuitable for such a plan as recently as 2010.

If politicians are serious about a grand nation-building project they should be focusing on 21st century opportunities—and not 19th century opportunities, like the Ord scheme, Mr Campbell said.

‘For me, the obvious one is large scale development of the renewable energy resources of northern Australia integrated into our region.'

‘We would be exporting solar, potentially long-term geothermal and tidal energy into enormous growing markets in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and up into China.'

‘To me, that’s the sort of big, visionary scheme that we should be thinking about and co-investing in with our neighbours, not just trying to dream up things that we can sell to the countries to our north.’

‘Yes we could increase food production in the north...but it’s not going to be a big contribution to meeting the 70 per cent of extra food that the world’s going to need by 2050,’ he said.

Indigenous development and environmental and tourism opportunities should also be integrated into any nation building plans in the north, he said.