..being a massive contribution to conversation no-one in public life in Australia including parliamentarians allowed to be had for the eighty years since World War II – on pain of brutal punitive extra-judicial reaction in the breach, generated by Thomas Reis, communicating with the world on the e-comms app ‘X’ as ‘at’ peakaustria.

“Dryland salinity in Western Australia’s agricultural areas is now estimated to directly affect up to 2 million hectares and cost over half a billion dollars a year in lost agricultural production. With few exceptions, the south-west’s rivers also suffer from increasing salinity levels and much of the wheatbelt’s remaining biodiversity is being severely damaged by the spreading salt.

“Yet between 1948 and 1969 successive Western Australian governments sold off an average of 400,000 hectares (a million acres) of land for agriculture every year, and the issue continued to be denied and suppressed
“In the mid-1960s Dorothy Hewett wrote in ‘Legend of the Green Country’ about her father’s efforts to tackle salinity on their farm, near Wickepin. At this time, the Minister for Agriculture said it was likely that more than 50 per cent of the native vegetation would have to be retained to prevent water tables from rising. He thought it was illogical to stop clearing, as some salt encroachment would most likely occur anyway.

“But of course it wasn’t his property being affected. In 1974 an Ongerup farming family sought to have the saline country they had been allocated replaced with farmable land. The Under Secretary for Lands, writing to the Minister, said:
it behooves us to be very careful indeed as surveys in 1955 and 1962 show that the used farming land which had become salt affected amounted to 186,000 acres and 305,000 acres respectively. The situation after 12 years will be appreciably worse. Yes, I am most concerned over the precedent, which will be established [if we agree to replace saline with arable land].

“In the river catchments of the wetter south-west, where government had a direct economic interest in protecting its potable water supplies, it still took 25 years of internal pressure from Public Works Department scientists and others before rigid clearing controls were introduced, from 1976 onwards.

“In a reprieve and return to business as usual it would be the mid-1990s before government started fully acknowledging the extent of the problem. By then the science was well accepted and the predictions of ongoing damage frightening. The Decade of Landcare had seen farmers mobilised like never before, and the early 1990s saw a flurry of reports and strategies. In 1996 the Court Government declared ‘War on Salinity’ and agency budgets were increased. A Situation Statement and Action Plan were developed, refined and actioned. When the ALP came to power in 2001 they allocated additional funds to salinity research and remediation. Soon after, the federal government launched its National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. Western Australia was a significant beneficiary.
For a while it appeared that the tables had been turned and there was real political will to tackle the creeping menace. However, the change was short-lived. Under Kevin Rudd’s ‘Caring for our Country’ program, federal funding for salinity declined steeply after 2008, and in Western Australia Colin Barnett’s new coalition government dropped salinity from its list of priorities.

“Departmental hydrologists who had been focused on solutions to salinity were diverted north to search for potable water under pastoral leases, and the state progressively withdraw agency support for local landcare groups. Advisory and consultative bodies, who had driven development of the earlier ‘war on salinity’, were closed down, and the Commissioner for Soil Conservation, who in the early 1990s drew on the work of 24 staff, was left with two. Not surprisingly, the number of landcare groups in farming areas has also declined.

“Despite being left effectively stranded by this wholesale withdrawal of government support, individual farmers, and those landcare groups who survived the cutbacks, have continued to undertake some excellent and innovative work in tackling salinity and other severe degradation problems. There has been widespread adoption of higher water use farming systems, big gains made in development of saltland pasture systems, and many farmers have invested heavily in relatively unproven drainage systems.
But overall, we don’t know what’s working well and what isn’t. The Auditor–General found that ‘The last satellite imagery analysis that mapped salinity was in 2000 [when] severely salt affected land was increasing by 14,000 hectares per year.”

– TR

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Saturday 20th January 2024