CHAPTER 21
Lyndon Megarrity
In 1909, Australian poet Mabel Forrest urged her fellow Australians to:
Arm the empty North that drowses by its tide-washed sandy slopes;
There is iron in the ranges, there is silver in the stopes,
There is wealth undreamed – your birthright – in the country’s scattered parts,
There is grit and honest courage in your people’s loyal hearts.1
Forrest’s ‘pioneer’ sentiments now seem old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the economic progress of the less-populated northern half of Australia remains a national project that shows no signs of completion any time soon. Since Federation, the Commonwealth has created policies and programs designed to develop Northern Australia and to alleviate isolation for its residents.2 Over several generations, especially since the Second World War, the Commonwealth has made a major contribution to improving life in the tropics. Despite these gains, the political fear that the north is not living up to its full potential remains visceral, and claims that the north is neglected continue to be vehemently expressed by state and national MPs.
Historically, Commonwealth politicians and officials have tended to regard the north primarily as a distant, economic frontier. This traditional mindset continues to influence contemporary policymakers and, as we will see, such frontier sentimentality gets in the way of developing effective policies that enhance the quality of life for all Northern Australians. Policymakers must also understand that imagining Northern Australia as a broad geographical zone is not always helpful in understanding the nature of local and regional communities within the tropics.
Northern development policy, 1901–60
Northern Australia has no official geographical status. It will be defined here as those parts of Queensland, the Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA) which are located north of the Tropic of Capricorn, although policymakers have often included areas far below the Tropic line as part of the remote north. Over the last 120 years, this concept of Northern Australia as a super-region encompassing all Australian territory north of Capricorn has gone in and out of fashion.
Pastoralism was the dominant industry in much of inland Northern Australia by 1901, although as the twentieth century progressed, large-scale mining became increasingly significant. Sugar was also profitably produced along the North Queensland coast, which had higher rainfalls and more fertile soil than elsewhere above the Tropic of Capricorn. The transport of sugar, mining and pastoral products to the coast resulted in population growth in Townsville, Darwin and other regional ports, but the north was otherwise sparsely populated by Europeans in the early twentieth century. Roughly 115 000 non-Indigenous people lived north of the Tropic of Capricorn in 1901, and of these, up to a quarter were non-Europeans. Inland from the populous areas of the coast, Northern Australia had a substantial Indigenous population, many living in Christian missions or working within primary industries such as pastoralism. Historian Russell McGregor has estimated that at the turn of the twentieth century, the Indigenous population was ‘probably … declining but still numbered over 100,000 across the north’.3 Because Australian elites were focused on developing and maintaining a European-dominated Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people tended to be disregarded in discussions of Northern development policy.
Northern Australia’s low population troubled many white Australians in the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the notion of a White Australia predominantly settled by British migrants was at its height. The north of the continent was often regarded as dangerously ‘empty’ because its European population was limited. If the region was not developed by Australians, it was argued, Asian countries would be tempted to invade and destroy ‘White Australia’ forever. Aside from fears of invasion by foreign powers, many northern boosters were perturbed by the notion of an untamed northern frontier not realising its commercial potential.
In part, a shortage of federal funds and the expense of providing infrastructure over a vast region discouraged Commonwealth action on northern development for several decades. Political reasons also led to northern neglect. There were only a handful of northern electorates, and most voters lived well south of the Tropic of Capricorn. With few leading politicians having much experience or genuine interest in Northern Australia, fear of the ‘Empty North’ tended to be abstract rather than real. Consequently, before the Second World War, the Commonwealth’s two major northern policy initiatives were marked by fine parliamentary speeches but lukewarm commitment to the north itself. The federal government purchased the Northern Territory from South Australia and established an administration in 1911, but starved it of funds that might have created improved infrastructure and amenities. Further, while the Commonwealth-funded Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine (established in 1910) conducted research which helped to disprove popular perceptions that whites could not physically and mentally thrive in the tropics, by the 1930s the institute was closed, and government funding was transferred to the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Sydney University.
The Second World War was a turning point in the history of Commonwealth engagement with Northern Australia. Because the Commonwealth from 1942 became the only Australian government allowed to collect income tax (a temporary wartime measure that has remained in place) federal powers were expanded. This encouraged northern people to seek Commonwealth support for local projects, using the renewed fear of Asian invasion during the Pacific War as a bargaining chip.
Queensland politicians, such as Premier Ned Hanlon (1946–52), were especially vocal on the importance of developing the postwar north. Indeed, the economic and political clout of North Queensland’s urban centres had grown as northern sugar, mining and beef production accelerated in the postwar years. Ironically, infrastructure such as roads and bridges was, in some years, an insufficient match for the elements, with rains cutting off a number of northern towns for extended periods. Crippling droughts and the lack of substantial dams in some areas increased the business uncertainty of primary producers. However, the Chifley Labor government was unmoved by the Queensland government’s push for more Commonwealth funding for northern development.
In contrast to his caution over northern proposals, Prime Minister Ben Chifley initiated the ambitious Snowy Mountains scheme in 1949. Completed 25 years later, the scheme diverted water inland from the eastward-flowing Snowy River, allowing the redirected water to be used for hydroelectricity and irrigation in parts of New South Wales and Victoria. The Snowy River scheme proposal had been discussed in state and federal circles for several years. By contrast, northern infrastructure projects were distant from Canberra and the overall return on federal investment was unclear.
Liberal-Country Party Prime Minister Robert Menzies (1949–66) placed Northern Australia very low on his agenda. Yet the Korean War and Asian militarism drew renewed attention to Australia’s vulnerable north. The public imagined that if Australians did not develop the north, other nations would. The increasing exploitation of northern minerals, such as uranium and iron ore, during the Menzies era added to the sense that the north needed to be both defended and populated as a national priority. Further, the development of Northern Australia was viewed by many politicians as a potential nation-building exercise, inspired largely by the hugely popular Snowy Mountains scheme. Projects like the ‘Snowy’ and projected northern proposals appealed to traditional European notions of taming the wilderness, defined concisely by Menzies’ National Development Minister W.H. Spooner as the ‘achievement of man’s age-old dream of making nature serve his purposes’.4
The politics of northern development, 1960–75
The Menzies government responded to electoral pressures regarding northern neglect by supporting a limited, but significant, number of large projects. It provided a major loan to the Queensland government to help finance a reconstruction of the Mount Isa to Townsville Railway; it invested heavily in beef roads for northern producers; and it also agreed in 1964 to build a large army base in Townsville. But these achievements remained overshadowed by persistent claims by the media and the federal opposition that the north was not living up to its full potential.
The urbane Gough Whitlam emerged as an unlikely advocate for northern development. As deputy opposition leader (1960–67) and opposition leader (1967–72) he saw an opportunity to increase Labor’s vote in development-oriented Queensland by portraying himself as the neglected north’s champion in Canberra. It also provided him with an opportunity to show his party and the electorate that he had the vision to be prime minister.
Crucially, Whitlam believed that securing votes in the north, especially in Queensland, could assist in the revival of federal Labor’s fortunes. The modest increase in the number of electorates in Queensland during the postwar years gave credence to the rising politician’s conviction. Before 1949, there were only two Queensland House of Representatives electorates situated above the Tropic of Capricorn: Kennedy and Herbert. Another electorate, Capricornia, was partly above and partly below the Tropic of Capricorn. Population growth along the north coast and an enlargement of the parliament subsequently led to the creation in 1949 of two new federal divisions in northern Queensland – Leichhardt (Far North Queensland) and Dawson (centred on Mackay and surrounding districts). The people of north-west Western Australia and the Northern Territory, on the other hand, had only one Lower House seat each in federal parliament during the twentieth century. Indeed, from 1901 until relatively recently (2008), north-west Western Australia was part of the gigantic but sparsely populated federal electorate of Kalgoorlie, covering most of the geographical area of the state.
In his parliamentary speeches and on the campaign trail in the 1960s, Whitlam argued that Northern Australia’s mineral and agricultural wealth held the key to Australia’s future economic prosperity. The north’s consequent national importance justified federal investment in schemes like the proposed retention of the Snowy Mountains Authority to develop northern water resources. Whitlam insisted that only the Commonwealth had the resources necessary to complete an ambitious northern infrastructure program of dam-building, road construction and power generation.
Whitlam’s national vision for Northern Australia was not overly original. He drew upon ideas canvassed in the postwar years by a broad range of individuals and groups, including newspaper journalists; academics, such as Douglas Copland; North Queensland lobby groups, such as the People the North Committee; and even William Hudson, the head of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority. What Whitlam added to the political debate was his tremendous confidence in the capacity and righteousness of Commonwealth action. Where Menzies and his ministry were often keen to dismiss northern matters as the responsibility of the states concerned, namely WA and Queensland, Whitlam, in theory, saw no impediments to Commonwealth authority. Section 96 of the Constitution, as Whitlam keenly pointed out, gave the Commonwealth the ability to give money to the states for any purpose it saw fit.
The high point of Whitlam’s commitment to Northern Australia came in 1966, when he helped Labor candidate Rex Patterson win the by-election for the Mackay-centred Queensland federal seat of Dawson. A well-respected expert on sugar, Patterson had recently resigned from the Commonwealth public service over government inaction on northern policy. Concentrating on the theme of northern development, Whitlam tirelessly campaigned alongside Patterson who won what had been considered a safe Country Party seat with a swing of 12 per cent. Probably connected to the shock of the Patterson win, the Holt government and its Liberal-Country Party successors subsequently increased federal support for the Ord River irrigation project in north-west Australia. Completed in 1972, the Ord River Dam gave the Coalition a spectacular northern project for which it could claim some credit.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the Australian national media and most Commonwealth parliamentarians had lost enthusiasm for Northern Australia as a political issue. Whitlam himself turned more and more to foreign affairs policy to boost his personal profile as opposition leader. Northern development remained part of the federal Labor program, however, and when he became prime minister in 1972, Whitlam appointed Rex Patterson as Australia’s first Minister for Northern Development.
Patterson’s ministerial freedom was severely undermined because the ministers for Transport, Minerals and Energy and other portfolios enjoyed nationwide jurisdiction and had no incentive to hand over regional responsibilities to a Northern minister. Nonetheless, he did secure bilateral agreements with Asian countries to purchase Queensland sugar. The Whitlam government also provided several million dollars to facilitate the building of northern dams and beef roads. However, the outcomes were modest in comparison to Whitlam’s frontier vision of a vast new Snowy Mountains scheme to develop the tropics. In any event, doubts were emerging about the wisdom of focusing on nation-building dams. The Ord irrigation scheme in the north-west, for example, had proven to be relatively unprofitable.
One reason for the decline in attention to northern matters was that circumstances had changed. The gradual dismantling of the White Australia policy between 1966 and 1973 meant that stirring up fears of Asian invasion was no longer an appropriate or relevant way of drawing attention to the north, but nothing as compelling had yet taken its place. Further, the notion that commercial development of the so-called Empty North was a moral right and duty was now being questioned by the general community, with the desire to save natural attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef from environmental damage posing a challenge to would-be developers.
The increasing freedoms and rights granted to Indigenous groups in the 1960s and 1970s were also changing public perceptions about the nature of development in the north. Significantly, legislation passed in 1962 gave Indigenous people the right to vote in Commonwealth elections, and by 1965, Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders were entitled to vote in state elections in each of the six states. Around the same time, Indigenous people were officially encouraged to leave missions and reserves and live an independent life, often in regional towns and cities. Suddenly, politicians were compelled to respond to Indigenous people in the north as activists and electors; partly as a result, Indigenous land rights became a lively political issue, especially in the Northern Territory.
The advent of land rights legislation under Whitlam and his successor, Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, served to challenge the popular assumption that northern development was an unqualified good that did not need to take into account Indigenous wishes. As a result of a Commonwealth Act of Parliament in 1976, the return of traditional lands in the NT to Aboriginal people began to occur: the clash this caused with mainstream developers with more commercial attitudes to land use was a key issue influencing debates about the future of northern development. After the Mabo High Court decision in 1992, the right of traditional owners to native title was enacted by governments across Australia. Negotiations between native title owners and developers, especially mining companies, have become part of the cultural and political process of northern development.
Another reason Northern Australia faded as a policy concern during and after the Whitlam years was because the north was and is too fragmented to be the focus of a single overarching suite of development policies. Of the three political regions resting under the Northern Australia umbrella, the northern parts of Queensland are by far the most developed, thanks to a series of medium-sized cities across the coast.
North-West Australia, North Queensland and the NT (self-governing from 1978) are sufficiently distant from one another to have their own social, political and economic traditions based on state and territory boundaries.
Northern neglect: The suburban frontier of Northern Australia
While better sealed roads, greater access to commercial flights, the internet and other improvements and innovations have alleviated much of the physical isolation of living in the north since the 1970s, there remains in Northern Australia a sense of psychological isolation from the main centres of political and financial power. The cyclical calls for northern dams, big mining projects and business opportunities give a level of media attention to the north it does not usually receive. Conveniently forgetting the suburban nature of most of the northern population, the perennial idea of the north as a frontier needing people and development continues to have passing appeal to armchair ruralists in the south.
Since the Whitlam era, the notion that the north has been marked by national neglect has also been pursued by a range of northern-based politicians, including Bob Katter Junior. Subsequently, the Liberal-National Coalition saw benefit in highlighting the ‘neglected north’ narrative as a major political theme in the lead-up to the 2013 federal election.5 Notably, the Coalition attracted the media’s interest by promoting the concept of the ‘Northern food bowl’. This would be created by harnessing Northern Australia’s rainfalls through new dams and agricultural development, allowing northern producers to feed the growing Asian populations to the north. The northern food bowl idea was not new. For decades, its advocates had argued that strategic water projects were a fail-safe recipe for agricultural wealth. However, the aridity of the climate, the limited fertility of the soil and the north’s unpredictable rainfall patterns have discouraged both government and private investment.
Nevertheless, the Coalition in 2013 presented the northern food bowl as a viable proposition. As Whitlam had found in a previous generation, Northern Australia gave Liberal opposition leader Tony Abbott a talking point in the media, as he attempted to position himself as the alternative prime minister. Abbott’s promotion of Northern Australia allowed him to talk about grand themes at a time when the Australian media’s focus on Labor issues tended to be on its internal divisions rather than its policies.
Like the ALP in the 1960s, the Coalition in 2013 saw electoral advantage in selling the north as a wilderness for the nation to tame, stating that
Northern Australia … is often regarded as Australia’s ‘last frontier’. No longer will Northern Australia be seen as the last frontier: it is in fact, the next frontier … it remains underutilised relative to the rest of the country, despite its natural, geographic and strategic assets.6
The Coalition won the 2013 election. While the northern food bowl thought bubble quickly burst, the new government subsequently released a white paper on developing Northern Australia, which indicated that the Coalition continued to view the north through a narrow economic prism. The 2015 White Paper envisaged that the Commonwealth’s role was to facilitate, but not drive, commercial development. It also asserted that the successful economic development of Northern Australia required rapid population growth. The Coalition hoped to see the region grow from 1.3 million people in 2015 to 4–5 million by 2060.
The history of northern cities such as Townsville and Darwin over the last three decades suggests that if the Northern Australia White Paper’s proposed population surge goes ahead, the social and cultural problems surrounding development will frequently be sidelined by developers and various layers of government. The aspects of a northern district which make it unique and valued by residents are all too often deemed expendable by economic decision-makers. Mirroring patterns of civic development across the nation, many heritage buildings have been destroyed and the landscapes of northern coastal towns now feature high-rise buildings and motels that fail to blend in with the environment. It remains to be seen whether the Coalition’s uncritical support of high population and economic growth in the north can be carefully balanced with other popularly supported northern goals, such as environmental sustainability and tourism.
Following the White Paper, the Coalition’s progress on fulfilling its northern vision has been relatively slow, often marked more by announcements of funding than the completion of roads and special northern projects.7 Designed to provide financial assistance for major development projects which could create jobs and infrastructure in the north, the Coalition’s $5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) initiative was panned by Labor as the ‘no actual infrastructure fund’: only $218.4 million had been spent by October 2020.8 Nevertheless, by mid-2021, NAIF had committed $2.9 billion to support a ‘wide range of industries’ such as ‘agriculture, aquaculture, energy and resources’.9 Tellingly, while regional universities are benefiting from Commonwealth NAIF loans for new major buildings, the study of history, literature and other humanities subjects at the same institutions has been allowed to decline sharply since the 1990s. Neither is there much Commonwealth interest in arts and media infrastructure, which is mostly dominated by southern organisations.
Port Darwin, sovereignty and Australian history
For all the renewed policy focus on Northern Australia, Commonwealth officials still seemed to be taken by surprise by an incident involving the Northern Territory, Australian sovereignty and diplomatic relationships with two major powers: China and the United States.10 In 2015, the NT government agreed to give the Chinese-owned Landbridge company a 99-year lease over key port facilities at the Port of Darwin. The deal gave the revenue-hungry NT administration $506 million and the potential to win political kudos, indirectly, from the expansion of economic activity at the port. Ideologically committed to ‘small government’ and privatisation, the Coalition government in Canberra expressed its approval. The federal Minister for Northern Australia, Josh Frydenberg, described the Port of Darwin deal as a ‘vote of confidence in the Northern Territory’, which displayed ‘foreign investor confidence in the economic opportunities available in Australia’s north’.11
Doubts, however, soon emerged about the wisdom of allowing foreign investors with potential links to the Chinese government to have long-term commercial access to the strategic northern Port of Darwin. Ironically, the Port of Darwin lease deal emerged a few short years after the ALP government under Julia Gillard and then US president Barack Obama set in place a long-term joint defence initiative, involving the training of US marines (together with Australian defence force personnel) each year in the Top End of Australia. That the joint training program was located in Northern Australia was not surprising; it was symbolic of policy concerns given expression in the Defence White Paper of 2013: ‘An effective, visible force posture in northern Australia and our northern and western approaches is necessary to demonstrate our capacity and our will to defend our sovereign territory.’12
Yet subsequently, the NT government leased the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company in 2015 with what appears to have been extremely limited Commonwealth oversight. The US government was not told of the sale before the public announcement. It is possible that the Australian authorities viewed leasing the Port of Darwin as just one more of a string of expedient privatisations by state/territory governments; but the US Obama administration expressed disappointment that its Australian allies had not kept it informed of a decision involving China, the US’s major geo-political rival in the Asia-Pacific.
The Port of Darwin lease was one of many Chinese investment projects in Australia in recent years which have attracted local media, political and public attention.13 Such commercial undertakings have created an atmosphere of uncertainty about the Chinese government’s intentions within Australia’s broader region. Major Chinese investments in Australia have been taking place within the context of heavy involvement of state-owned enterprises in Chinese overseas mining investments and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, along with an accelerated Chinese economic presence in the Pacific.
Arguably, a factor which contributed to the Commonwealth’s policy confusion over the Port of Darwin controversy was the fact that since 1901, Northern Australia has tended to be on the periphery of Commonwealth concerns. It is assumed by the media, citizens and officials that the nation’s important events and decisions generally take place in the south-east corner of the country. Therefore, it can be difficult for policymakers to respond comprehensively to Northern Australian issues and events when they suddenly become the focus of media interest. It follows that potentially serious issues of sovereignty and diplomacy in the north may continue to create awkward moments for the Commonwealth well into the future.
Lessons from history: Responding to local and regional diversity
As with Australia–Asia relations, the north is regularly ‘discovered’ by politicians and journalists, and the image of an ‘Empty North’ seems a necessary political narrative for each generation of ‘pioneer’ visionaries wanting to place their stamp on Australia’s northern frontier. Almost as regularly as a hot, debilitating northern summer, Northern Australia becomes a big news item as publicity gets generated for a variety of schemes, such as ambitious dams, large mines and agricultural ventures. Just as regularly, Northern Australia disappears from the political agenda, as journalists and politicians get bored with it, and only so much ever gets delivered out of all the promises and rhetoric.
The reason politicians and journalists move on very quickly from the Northern Australia issue is that the north remains for most Australians as remote from their lives as it was in Chifley’s time. Furthermore, the notion of Northern Australia as a super-region is more a convenient policy fiction than a fact: it is a currently fashionable label predominantly applied to economic and construction projects of local and regional significance in specific areas of the north.
What, then, can policymakers learn from the history of Commonwealth engagement with the north? First and foremost, federal and local politicians need to acknowledge the strengths and limitations of the age-old, grand Northern Australia vision. While the super-region concept is applicable to areas such as defence and the protection of national borders, the claims of northern neglect have a great deal in common with those in other regional and local areas across Australia. Therefore, a strong national commitment to improving amenities, basic infrastructure and quality of life across the continent in regional and local communities would ultimately be of more benefit to the north than the quick fix of mega-projects.
Second, the working definition of ‘northern development’ needs to be broader than that which has traditionally guided Commonwealth policy. Sometimes the best northern development may involve minimising development: we need, for example, to preserve areas of natural beauty such as tropical rainforests and islands so that future generations can appreciate and be enriched by them.
Furthermore, it should be remembered that capitalist concepts of northern development do not necessarily appeal to Aboriginal people living on traditional lands in remote areas who are reluctant to move because of family ties. The current Australian economic system advantages those who live in major and regional cities or are willing to move to them for work. How can remote Indigenous groups benefit from northern development while retaining their links to Country? Northern Institute researcher Rolf Gerritsen has argued that ‘traditional Aboriginal skills in land and fire management could be augmented by roles in biosecurity and biodiversity protection to create a natural resource management … economy’ across ‘remote Australia’.14 In any case, it is clear that a northern development framework which incorporates consultation with rural, remote and urban Indigenous people will result in more democratic and targeted policy outcomes.
Finally, policymakers need to question the hidden assumption that Northern Australia is a wilderness that needs to be tamed through economic development and population growth. Such policy assumptions serve to devalue the wider aspirations of people who live in the tropics. Our national understanding of the north must encompass more than economic development, it must also incorporate civics, culture and the environment. Commonwealth and state investment in social and cultural infrastructure in the north is needed to create intellectual and creative opportunities for the next generation of northern residents, and to build on the strengths, talents and initiative of local communities. Such a flowering of new ideas and energy would surely benefit the nation as a whole.