A Modest Farmer [Bert Kelly], “Our great open spaces … an empty blessing,” The Australian Financial Review, May 19, 1978, p. 3. Reprinted minus the first three paragraphs in Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 10-12, as “Limited Resources (2).”

I have often remarked that, in politics, ignorance is no barrier to eloquence. And nothing so loosens the tongue of eloquence more than discussion about Australia’s resources.

To hear politicians giving tongue on this subject you would think that it had been easy to develop Australia, but those of us who know our farming are only too well aware that this is far from the truth.

Because I don’t know much about mining I tend to think that there is no end to the opportunities for easy and profitable mining development but Eccles says that this is a measure of my ignorance about mining.

Because I know something about farming I always get irritated when I hear foolish people talking about Australia’s immense agricultural resources, about how fortunate we are to have our great open spaces.

When you hear a chap talking that kind of nonsense you will know that he is either a city slicker or a member of Parliament who has been in Canberra too long and has gone soft in the head.

Those of us who know our great open spaces from grim personal experience know how tough and cruel they can be and what a big barrier they are in the path of “the development of this great country of ours” to use a phrase heard continually in Parliament.

It is interesting to look at a breakup of those land resources about which you hear such easy eloquence. The total area of the country is 769 million hectares (m. hs). Of this, 532 m. hs has a rainfall too low for agriculture fed by rainfall.

People claim that the soils of these arid inland areas are wonderfully fertile. “Things grow so fast after a rain that you pretty well have to jump back when you plant seeds on these wonderfully fertile soils,” they tell you proudly, but this is mainly nonsense.

The reason for this quick response after drought is that the soil has been lying fallow during drought and so becomes pregnant with fertility, particularly nitrogen. But when irrigation water is applied regularly to such soils, their true infertility quickly becomes apparent.

We must accept the fact that most of the arid inland soils would not repay irrigation, even if we had the water to spare to use for this purpose.

But to return to the composition of our land resources that are suitable for agriculture: after deducting the 532 m. hs of arid land we are left with 237 m. hs with sufficient rain for agriculture. Of this, 105 m. hs are too steep and rugged, 55 m. hs too stony or shallow, leaving 77 m. hs suitable for agriculture.

In 1974, this 77 m. hs was being used as follows: 17 m. hs in crop or fallow, 26 m. hs in improved pasture, 7 m. hs used for urban development, and 25 m. hs still undeveloped.

Of this 25 m. hs, 4 m. hs was under cypress pine in NSW and Queensland and 2 m. hs under jarrah and karri in WA. You would be a brave man to suggest the clearing of the latter group with Perth’s water supply threatened by salt.

If the 6 m. hs are to be left under timber, that only leaves 19 m. hs available for development for rain-fed farming. And, believe me, that 19 m. hs will take some cracking. They will be rougher and tougher than almost any country has ever tackled. I have seen uncleared scrub in the middle of India and Ceylon which would have been cleared years ago in Australia. We have cleared too much land rather than too little.

But the figure that startled me most was the 7 m. hs under urban development, 7 out of 77 m. hs! When these figures were compiled four years ago, we were using land for town use at a stocking rate of two people per hectare for houses, roads, railways, playing fields, golf courses and so on.

So if the Australian population were to expand at the rate of a few years ago, we would have to look very critically at where we built our future cities. There would then be far greater pressure on the 77 m. hs of land suitable for agriculture to provide food for ourselves and the rest of the world, so we would have to think twice about building cities on it.

If these figures are correct, and they are culled from a paper [Presidential Address to South Australian Branch of the Institute of Agricultural Science, Adelaide, 1976, in the journal of the Institute, September 1976] by Dr Hellsworth, chairman Land Resources Laboratories, CSIRO, so they are unlikely to be wrong, we should not be building new cities at Albury-Wodonga or Monarto but at the head of the Australian Bight, so that we would not be using up our very limited supply of farming land.

So the next time you catch a politician talking about our great open spaces, look at him with a jaundiced eye.