The best part about Australia’s democracy is that someone from the Government doesn’t come out and shoot you if you disagree with them.
The worst part is that they are forced to make their plans and spend their money to bring in projects in the last six months of their term in order to be re-elected.....or so they think.
Doubling Queensland’s food production would not be a huge issue given State financing for equipment, production, transport and irrigation.
Huge volumes of water currently flow into the sea every day, and a project which writer Ion Idriess conceived in the 1920’s – diverting this water through the divide and into the inland waterways would see much of the outback turned into fertile land all the way down to lake Eyre. (Idriess by the way had WALKED to each of the areas he recommended)
These examples of specatular lateral thinking show us what can be done if there’s a will:
The British Government could see before WW2 that the Germans were outstripping them in military aircraft production, so in some smart lateral thinking they approached Lord William Morris, Viscount Nuffield, a car salesman.
He co-ordinated car plants to produce aircraft, and employed women to build them and by 1940 Nuffield factories were the main source of British fighters.
So the Germans were beaten in the air by a fleet of English Morrises.
In the US, Detroit retooled from cars to aircraft and in two thirds of the normal gestation period for a car, rolled the first B24 Liberator off the line at the Ford plants, which at one stage were rolling them off at one per hour, and built nearly 9000.
General Motors built fighters, Chrysler built fuselages and Packard built Rolls Royce Merlin engines for Mustangs.
The general population did their part by driving anround in old clunkers until the end of the war when Detroit re-tooled the lines and built record numbers of new cars to replace the clunkers.
It is a very spectacular story of innovation, lateral thinking and co-operation.
They built:
•nearly 300,000 aircraft (compared to Japan’s 70,000)
•more than 600,000 jeeps
•nearly 2.4 million military trucks
•more than 88,000 tanks
•more than 6.5 million rifles
•40 billion bullets
Sources:
•American History@Source101
•Perilous Fight
•America’s Last real Home Front