via PETER
Here’s a good letter in today’s Australian (or should that be, The Tasmanian?) about Bartlett’s plans to flood the Midlands:
PREMIER David Bartlett has a dream: Tasmania as Australia’s food bowl, “Bye-bye Apple Isle, hello national food bowl”, 18/8: HERE. He refuses to face cold reality and your editorial (“A natural food bowl”, 18/8) includes both truth and delusion.
Tasmania, or at least part of it, is wet. The proposed food bowl region is not: it’s as dry as outback NSW. Few mainlanders realise Tasmania has a dry eastern heart.
Bartlett’s scheme depends on the irrigation of areas with poor soils and salinity risks from rivers already over-committed.
The really fertile, watered areas in the northwest and northeast of Tasmania have now largely been dismantled and given over to
plantations: foolish federal and state policies about forestry in the absence of sound planning have completely distorted economies and hydrology.
Tasmania could be a food bowl but not without a recognition of the commercial reali¬ties in the choice of crops and their market¬ability, and an integrated water, land-use and forest-planning regime to maximise all indus¬tries and resources.
There is absolutely no sign of this at the present time, indeed the opposite is the rule.
The first sample of grand schemes, the Coal River Scheme, has created enormous problems for those participating due to a failure to manage the available water resources, and we have yet to see how the second, on the Meander River, works out.
I’m a geohydrologist of 45 years’ standing and it’s painful to watch this kind of stupidity: Tasmania has many mini Murray-Darlings in the making. What’s needed is a realistic dream and some coherent, integrated policy.
D. E. Leaman
Bellerive, Tas
The definitive earlier analysis on Tasmanian Times:
Dr Mike Walker, John Lawrence, HERE. Comment at the end of John Lawrence’s article
