60 years later and the Brisbane line is still deeply embedded in the Australian political psyche.

With a large number of water entitlements gone from the Ag sector in the Murray Darling system and the area never likely to produce anywhere near as much food as they have in the past, the jerks that run the show in Canberra, Brisbane and other state capitals had better come up with something pretty good on how we are to produce enough food for a population that will double in forty or fifty years and also maintain our export potentials. It is very easy to tickle the vanity of the greens by having all the restrictions on northern development via Wild Rivers legislation and restrictions on irrigation, tree clearing etc. But when the crunch comes as it surely will, these foolish bits of legislation and regulation will have to be repealed. Sustainable development can and must be allowed in the North. Otherwise the perpetrators of these foolish bits of legislation will be held up to riddicule forever by historians whilst the citizens of this country regress in our standard of living and political stability.

Don't worry Trugger, China will supply all we need!

Hey, Jerangle, lovely prospect, isn't it? Wait until we are reliant on China to supply our food and then wonder why the Chinese are starting to be politically belligerent. I can just see it where their attitude will be , "Do what we want or we cut off your food supply". As I said, a lovely prospect, isn't it?

Perhaps it is the word 'sustainable' that is at issue here. It would appear large scale monoculture farming has proven less than truly sustainable in various quarters.

If the Federal Government has rejected Queensland as the food bowl of Australia and the NSW State Government is hell bent on making NSW the mining capital of Australia, we will all have to turn our backyards into mini market gardens. Pity the poor people in high rise apartments. A small verandah wouldn't provide much food!

In fact to believe that the north cannot fulfil a major role as a food producer for Australia (and export) requires a belief in climate modelling which suggests the north will become significantly less wet. Climate modelling to date has been proved dead wrong in virtully every instance (current temps are way outside IPCC predictions, by which I mean below). Why would models be right about this?

So the report provides nothing concrete to progress with, no full-scale feasibility studies - nothing but a bunch of words that lead to nowhere, and we already have a flat "no" from the masters - and the greenies haven't had their two bob's worth yet. So let's have another study, let's have a few more talk-fests. Give some wannabe pollies a job of organising meetings and making reports. Where is Never-Never land again?

Jerangle may be more correct on China supplying all we need than he or she realises. The spin and inaccuracy in the article above has the look of incredible bias that one might expect in Chinese media. Rudd has not said "no to a northern food bowl". The report is simply the obvious non political findings of an inquiry set up by John Howard. So much of the Australian press seems to assume its readers and advertisers automatically blame governments, especially Labor ones, for everything that goes wrong, including the weather, soils, geography and infrastructure of the north. If you are determined to manipulate facts in order to confuse or mislead your readers then perhaps you should tender your services to foreign governments. Personally, I'd prefer that you morph into a reliable source of well researched fact and intelligent unbiased commentary.

..another headline without any body and off we all go again with our comments. Why is it that the media continue to want to report half facts, events and comments. When will they have the guts to actually go back to old fashioned reporting and get out there to get the whole story. We will probably read in tomorrow's news that this story is not actually reported quite right and the perspective will change completely. I am sure that Fairfax and others only use articles like this to get us all to read nothing so that they can get their reader numbers up and sell more advertising space.