Chapter 17 : Conclusion

 At first glance, people will say irrigating the Australian interior will be too expensive for many years to come. Technology needs to advance to such an extent to bring the cost of such a venture right down. After all, other farmers elsewhere in the world get their water for free. How can you compete with that?

If we link sunlight and wind revenue directly to the production and delivery cost of water to our inland, then the equation looks much better. We are wasting our sunlight and wind to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Let's stop doing that!!! We need to create the infrastructure to link the two parts of the equation so they balance each other out. In the driest continent on the planet, it is just stupid not to do this!!!

The coastal corporations and townships will be building an ever-expanding economy. As it grows it will need more and more energy. Our farmers will never produce too much energy to sell because growing economies can never have too much energy. If energy costs go down because of the abundance of energy then production costs drop. Trade will increase both domestically and internationally. This will lead to a greater demand for energy. 

Technological advances are speeding up because we know more than we did before. Imagine if green energy doubled in efficiency over 10 years. That is potentially twice as much water getting to our interior. Now, imagine if the technology surrounding desalination doubled in efficiency over 10 years. That's now potentially four times as much water reaching our interior for the same cost as 10 years previously. The pipes would already be there. The research into the efficient application of water and soil improvement will also continually advance.  

Look at the effect of the Industrial Revolution on humanity. Over the last 2000 years and probably much more than that, humans produced perhaps a couple of hundred dollars of income per capita per annum. Then the Industrial Revolution occurred, and humans mechanized. The graph for human output per capita went up exponentially. All of a sudden, output was about $5000 per annum per capita over a relatively short period of history.

We mechanized our mills, and we have mechanized our land by creating large machinery for agriculture. But we can mechanize our land in two different ways. We have only done so in one way. Most of the potential of our vast land is yet to be unleashed.

We spend a lot of money educating our people, and we produce some very smart people. We also attract good people from overseas because of our relatively high standard of living. We need to keep these people here by sharing a vision of what this country could be. Those people would prefer to stay I believe rather than chase contracts and money overseas. We need to give them something they can sink their teeth into and pay them well to stay.

A country needs lots of smart people with access to resources, leadership, and a vision they can believe in and get behind. These people are more valuable than anything we can dig out of the ground. Let's not waste them by letting them go overseas to seek opportunities, as we have wasted the sun and wind. Let's offer research grants with purpose and reap the rewards in later years for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. Let's also encourage our superfunds to invest a portion of their wealth into venture capital projects that originate in Australia and want to stay in Australia. 

So, the limit to what is possible is not the comparative cost of water in different regions of the world. It is the value of the sun and wind across the Australian continent and our ingenuity in utilizing infrastructure so we can harness these wasted resources. By doing so, we change the future of Australia. But it takes vision and leadership to mobilize the resources to make this happen. Many seemingly unrelated parts need to be joined to create a coordinated force of change. 

Just like a conductor of an orchestra can turn many different sounding instruments from a cacophony into one beautiful sound, a skillful Government needs to bring all the necessary players together to create the synergy necessary to change a middle-ranked country into one of the greatest. 

In the world of Trump, where the global order of the last 80 years is vanishing before our eyes, we need a convincing plan of action that we can present to the citizens of this nation. We need not only our citizens, but all our neighbours to know that we are looking forward with excitement and positivity. And we want all of them to come with us on that ride. If we don't do this, then we will all be potential victims of larger bully nations. That's a scary world to live in, and we need to do our part to reassure everyone to believe in us, believe in themselves, and believe that a fair and just global order will prevail, with or without America.