Friday , April 26 2024
Home / John Quiggin / Reality, not greenies, the enemy of irrigation expansion

Reality, not greenies, the enemy of irrigation expansion

Summary:
That’s the title of my latest piece in The Guardian, responding to a Matt Canavan spray against critics of a recent CSIRO report canvassing options for expanded irrigation in Northern Australia. Interestingly, although Canavan comes across as a typical North Queensland developmentalist (for whom I would have some sympathy) he’s actually from the South-East corner, a UQ economics graduate and a former senior official of the Productivity Commission. Ten years ago, he’d have been debunking CSIRO in exactly the way I do in my report. After my piece came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter over whether CSIRO had really proposed a dam on the Fitzroy. Their report didn’t do any new analysis of major dams (a point they stressed) but dusted off a couple of existing proposals, then

Topics:
John Quiggin considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

John Quiggin writes The war to end war, still going on

Editor writes In search of radical alternatives

Stavros Mavroudeas writes «Οι καταστροφικές επιπτώσεις της ΕΕ στην Ελλάδα και τους εργαζόμενους» – Στ.Μαυρουδέας ΠΡΙΝ 20-21/4/2024

Stavros Mavroudeas writes «Κοινωνικές επιστήμες: είδος υπό εξαφάνιση;» – εκδήλωση Παντειέρα-Attac, 23/4/2024, 5.30μμ Πάντειο

That’s the title of my latest piece in The Guardian, responding to a Matt Canavan spray against critics of a recent CSIRO report canvassing options for expanded irrigation in Northern Australia. Interestingly, although Canavan comes across as a typical North Queensland developmentalist (for whom I would have some sympathy) he’s actually from the South-East corner, a UQ economics graduate and a former senior official of the Productivity Commission. Ten years ago, he’d have been debunking CSIRO in exactly the way I do in my report.

After my piece came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter over whether CSIRO had really proposed a dam on the Fitzroy. Their report didn’t do any new analysis of major dams (a point they stressed) but dusted off a couple of existing proposals, then did a more detailed analysis of a plan based on one or more smaller (25 GL or more) dams. None of them were economically sound, except when the magic of regional input-output multipliers was invoked.

John Quiggin
He is an Australian economist, a Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a former member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *