Harry Robinson returns to disagree with Alan Jones on how to spend $40 billion

Before the Bali bomb, something rare was happening in mainstream media -- subject matter was big,, substantial. For a while editors pushed football clubs and their salary caps, the antics of the Democrats and house prices to the inside pages. Instead, readers got “Drought- proofing Australia.”  A big idea indeed and one that aroused hot debate. Scientists were consulted and most had to play the dreary role of nay-sayer. A big, bad idea, they said.

Let’s go back over it.  Some months ago, packaging multi-billionaire Dick Pratt aroused interest with a project for laying pipes through agricultural land to carry irrigation water. The current open ditches, he said, wasted water through seepage and evaporation and only 20% if the water ever got near a plant. Pratt maintained that metal pipes could be laid at manageable cost and would pay high dividends in saved water, hence more farm production. Pratt is not a mere king of cardboard, he is known as an intelligent man who grounds his ideas in the real world. So people began to talk about a wide brown land given big patches of green. I don’t recall his using the term “drought-proofing Australia” at that time.

The drought ground on and distress calls were heard from the inland. They touched the hearts and minds of a bunch of important citizens, including Telstra chairman Bob Mansfield, media magnate Kerry Packer, veteran ad-man John Singleton and the strident radio shock-jock Alan Jones. The tender-hearted worthies announced that they felt moved to set up Farmhand Foundation which would first provide financial help for desperate farmers and would promote the idea of drought-proofing Australia. All you had to do, really, was dam up those neglected northern rivers around Arnhem Land, the Gulf country and round to Queensland’s Burdekin. Then pipe the water south to our parched inland and lo! the mulga would blossom like the rose. Alan Jones had a variation which he showed graphically -- run a pipe from the Ord dam in W.A. down through Alice Springs, on to Adelaide, across to the Murray and up into the dry soils of the Riverina. So simple, so obvious that you wondered why nobody had thought of it before.

Along came one scientist after another to explain the damage that would be caused, and the costs would be high in terms of money and degraded ecologies. Alan Jones scoffed at them. The debate appeared to stall.

Enter David Marr with a splendidly researched Mediawatch in which he pointed out that every promoter of Farmhand had a connection to Telstra and an interest in its full privatisation. Marr’s research also showed that Alan Jones had earlier broadcast a notion that country people would probably agree to sell off the 51% of Telstra still publicly owned and get their rewards from all sorts of improved infrastructure from the proceeds of around $40 billion.

We must not be too uncharitable but Marr had made a prima facie expose of the drought-proofing dream. A sceptic might say that the idea was a sham to get Telstra into the hands of business.

Maybe that would be a good thing but we need not enter the argument. Thanks to the Bali bomb, Farmhand and drought-proofing the continent dropped out of public view.

A nasty squall in a teacup? Yes, but it served one purpose: it revealed a perceived poor mindset in the national psyche, namely that we have assumed that Australia must farm every possible hectare and if a nice wad of money like $40 billion should turn up, then the natural thing, the only thing to do with that money would be to invest it in the national farm or the infrastructure to support the national farm. We’ve always had gallant folk out there on farms and stations and the deity intends that we always should. The mindset was that all spare cash should be invested in rural enterprise.

Clear headed policy makers would ask if agriculture can deliver the highest dividends possible or if spare cash could be invested for higher returns. The answer is plain: farming even at its best and even in good years can only pay a modest rate of return. Intellectual property and activity based on intellectual property can be made to pay far higher dividends. Investment in brains pays multiples of investment in soil and sweat. Intellectual property covers a multitude of things--drama, law, and literature among them. But the major share comes from science.

Just suppose Telstra were sold off and there was a neat swag of $40 billion dollars to spend, the national mindset might well see the money poured into the rural sector and science might miss another chance.

The Farmhand illusion had one useful outcome: it showed the limiting factor of the farm-farm-farm mindset. And it suggested that the science community ought to look for ways to create a new mindset in favour of intellectual property with emphasis on the pursuits of science. Instead of a thoughtless compliment to those brave souls who produce food and fibre against all odds, we ought to make pointy heads the national heroes.

[Editors Note: David Marr has updated his original Mediawatch segment and it makes interesting reading]