You Cannot Irrigate With Broadband.

Has our national government with its latest proposal to spend at least $43,000,000,000 for laying out a network of fibre-optic cables for the so-called ^-fast broadband lost the plot at a time when our most pressing need is a national plan for the conservation of water? If the broadband proposal were carried out, it will benefit the top end of society whereas if the water plan were carried out, it will benefit most, if not all Australians, and especially our farmers.

So where is the logic in this latest 'brainwave' of our Prime Minister? He appears to have been influenced unduly by his mentors overseas on how we should prioritise the investments in our infrastructure. While the photo-opportunity of Mr Kevin Rudd being seen shaking hands with the Big Boys on the world stage does give many Australians some vicarious titillation at the same time the ego of our Prime Minister is massaged, it has this unfortunate effect of going to our heads so we experience the loss, however temporary, of commonsense.

Some colleagues in the cabinet have apparently been carried away by the appearance of Prime Minster Rudd strutting around like a colossus to the point of repeating parrot-wise the `imperative' of joining the club of those countries which have had the broadband in the last 6 years.. Just because the news of the worst draught that Australia has experienced in a century or the worst bush-fire ever in Victoria has been displaced on television by, first, the news of floods in Queensland and, more recently, the `good news' of the leaders of the Group of 20 coming together to talk about the financial crisis spreading to the rest of the world from the Sub-prime mortgage trouble of Wall Street origin does not mean that drought ceases to be Australia's greatest enemy. Our politicians would be better off finding the time to talk to an Australian climatologist with ears close to the grassroots to learn the harsh truth of the priority of water security to Australia instead of listening to the drum-beats of the foreign carpet-baggers on the broadband. The reality is that Australia is really a minnow country. However, the advantage of being a young country is that we can learn from the mistakes of other matured countries and put our house in order instead of insisting on the privilege of repeating those similar mistakes.

The time and effort Mr Rudd spent presenting himself as some kind of guru, telling the other leaders in the G20 what the right things to do to stimulate economic growth are and what not to do could have been better employed by investing the resources still at the disposal of his government to ensure the survival of our grandchildren in Australia. He should, first, to put his broadband proposal on the backburner and, then, attend to the basic, longstanding threat to the home security front.

From their struggle since the 7th century to cope with the fury of the North Sea, the people of what is today the Netherlands (PayBas) have distilled two mottoes: