From myth to reality: new pathways for northern development

[Extract] There is much discussion and debate within the Australian community, government, the media and academia about the future development and potential of northern Australia. Foreign and Australian agriculturalists are looking to the nation's north with a weather-eye on food security and new economic opportunities. Mineral and energy exploration and development across the north have buttressed the nation's economic success over several decades. At the same time, the conservation sector would like to see the north's outstanding ecological values protected, and indeed, our tourism industry has been substantively based on the protection of key natural assets such as the Barrier Reef, the Kakadu wetlands and the Wet Tropics World Heritage Areas. Conservation and resource development interests alike, however, have had a mixed inter-face with the interests of the north's traditional owners, many of whom remain trapped in welfare dependency and poverty.\ud \ud Dale (2014) suggests that there are real opportunities for northern Australians within these new national debates. He considers that post-war northern Australian history has been characterised by several national-scale conflicts being played out in and around the north's regional and local communities. Some of these major conflicts have centred on managing the impact and legacy of major mining, agriculture and energy developments. Others have concerned the impact of growing government regulation that is constraining development opportunities within the northern Australian landscape. These types of development and conservation-based conflicts, however, strongly interface with the bigger policy debates about how to ‘close the gap’ between Indigenous and other Australians. These three issues represent conflict between very different sectors within Australian society, and have been based on vastly different narratives about the future of the north