The salinity demon

The current description can be seen here, where the status has been changed to "of concern". More importantly, the "estimated extent" section has been expanded to state: "In September 2003, remnant extent was <10,000ha and >30 per cent of the pre-clearing area remained."

And this raises a very intriguing issue. For we are told above that there is 9,428ha of saline land in the Qld part of the Murray-Darling Basin which is consistent with the <10,000ha mentioned in the RE description. But if this is in the order of 30 to 35 per cent of the original remnant area then the pre-settlement area of saline land must have been somewhere between 27,000ha and 31,000ha. And it logically follows that there has been a 70 per cent reduction in the area of saline affected land.

This was on the published record, and in a core element of the government’s knowledge framework on vegetation, as early as 1999. So when Beattie stood before a gathering in St George and announced his key principle on vegetation management to the entire Queensland electorate, that there would be "zero tolerance of denial" on the salinity issue, his key advisors would all have known that salinity was likely to have declined. They would have, and certainly should have, known that the forecasted 628,000ha of saline affected land had no basis in fact.

And it is a fact of history that none of the key departmental officers, like the then Director General of the Department of Natural Resources, and the current one, Mr Scott Spencer, who was then Director of the relevant departmental unit, nor the Director of the Queensland Herbarium, nor any of the listed authors of section 11 of Sattler & Williams, appear to have bothered to ensure that Beattie did not mislead Parliament when he subsequently made similar statements in the house.

It is also now a fact of history that none of the so-called Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists appear to have had sufficient mastery of the brief to be able to properly inform the Premier in the correspondence that played a key role in delivering an electoral mandate for action.

And through all the time when Beattie was immersed in grandstanding over a completely nonexistent, indeed, imaginary problem, providing draconian prescriptions for a demonised minority of his own community under a fraudulent mandate, the real infrastructure needs and core performance obligations to the people who actually voted for him were ignored to the point of culpable negligence.

As Shakespeare had Mark Anthony say of Caesar, "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones". And well we might say, so let it be with Beattie.