Tag Archive for: development

Removing the roadblocks to development in northern Australia

Northern Australia has always been a big place, with much of its diverse social and economic activity unseen from the outside. Even before the ink was dry on Australia’s constitution, translating policy developed in the south into action in this broad and isolated region was challenging. That’s as true today as it was back then.

Now, as Australia continues to adapt to its changed geopolitical, environmental and economic strategic circumstances, there’s yet another wave of policy discussions about the north. In this uncertain strategic context, Australia can ill afford not to get policy and practice right in northern Australia.

The good news is that this isn’t a matter of selling the importance of northern Australia. There are plenty of great private-sector entrepreneurs and big-thinking northern Australians who see the region’s potential. Many Australian and foreign investors already see the commercial opportunities in northern Australia for large-scale agriculture, mining (for example, gas and rare-earth minerals), hydrogen manufacturing and energy, to name but a few.

More than enough federal politicians in Australia’s north and south know that the area is strategically important. Sometimes, though, their motivation for acting is dampened by the limited number of votes available there.

The federal bureaucracy is also well aware of the north’s importance. Policy measures such as establishing the Office of Northern Australia and its master plan for the region’s economic growth, Our north, our future 2021–2026, illustrate the commitment.

What’s the issue, then?

Operating in northern Australia—whether building infrastructure, running a mine, producing agricultural products or deploying the Australian Defence Force—involves dealing with unique factors. These factors often unnecessarily come to be seen as impassable challenges. This ‘it’s all too hard’ thinking requires a mindset change, including new approaches to drive greater value for money, such as making longer-term infrastructure development commitments.

The latest swell of interest in northern Australia stretches across Australia’s private and public sectors and beyond. From Japan seeking energy security to the US Department of Defense looking for regional fuel security to various countries making direct investments (including China through Landbridge’s lease of Darwin Port), many parties have equities and interests in the north’s development.

It seems everyone has a plan for what they want to do in northern Australia—and many are acting on them. Unfortunately, these plans tend to be developed and implemented in silos. This is not to suggest that deep thought hasn’t been invested; rather, the plans’ siloed nature means that this thought is often based on assumptions that infrequently consider the cumulative changes that other siloed plans bring.

The economy in Australia’s north is very different to that which operates in the south. There’s little surplus capacity, especially in critical areas for infrastructure development like the construction sector—though it can scale up to meet most demands if given enough notice.

Activating the industrial base in northern Australia requires those involved in developments to signal their requirements to the market well in advance. They must also consider working across the private and public sectors to synchronise projects to ensure workforce availability. If this isn’t done right, the economy in northern Australia experiences socially and economically devastating boom and bust cycles. For project owners, boom cycles contribute to higher costs. Bust cycles aren’t beneficial either, because scaling the industry back up requires much longer lead times.

Substantial national infrastructure projects in southern Australia are often supported by long-term strategic policy and planning to ensure that new developments have access to affordable power, water, transportation and workforces. In contrast, new developments in northern Australia often require those involved to create and fund supporting infrastructure at a higher cost. The siloed approach to northern Australian projects usually means that these costs can’t be shared or reduced through interproject synchronisation.

The Office of Northern Australia and the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility have worked collaboratively to coordinate resilient and sustainable economic growth. These policy measures have already brought about significant changes. However, they haven’t been able to improve communication and coordination across the various government departments and private-sector investors with plans for northern Australia.

For example, the monolithic defence organisation struggles to integrate its own diverse, disparate infrastructure and enabling projects. At the state, territory and local government levels, public servants in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland consistently report the increasing number of visits by officials from across the defence organisation—and the often conflicting information they provide.

Given the increasing strategic uncertainty in our region and the work currently being undertaken by the defence organisation and Australia’s allies in northern Australia, it’s time for the federal government to address these project siloes and communication issues.

As a start, the government should expand the role and remit of the Office of Northern Australia, rebadging it as the Office for Northern Australia Policy Coordination. This office should be responsible for improving communication and consultation across the private and public sectors with and about northern Australia. It should also have the remit to work across the private and public sectors to improve project coordination and promote synchronisation and collaboration. It should focus on identifying channels for signalling markets and creating pathways for sustainable scaling of northern Australia’s industry base.

Through these efforts, the office could contribute to the kind of improved synchronisation of projects and collaboration that could reduce the severity of future boom–bust economic cycles in northern Australia. Just as importantly, it could be critical to national security in assisting the development of sustainable, on-time and fit-for-purpose defence and multi-user infrastructure in northern Australia.

The Dong Tam hostage crisis: issues, interests and social media

The Dong Tam hostage crisis in Vietnam’s north recently was a familiar mix of issues: possible corruption, land grabs, furious farmers, and a citizenry watching avidly from Facebook sidelines (they don’t trust their newspapers for this sort of stuff). However, the ending was a new one: the possibility of a fair resolution by the government.

It began as an argument over a patch of agricultural land in Dong Tam, a village of 6,000 just outside Hanoi. The land was given to Viettel, the army-owned telco giant, by the local government. This began in 2014; the government says it was for defence-related purposes, but the villagers said otherwise. After lengthy smaller scuffles and arguments, and intimidation, protests erupted properly in April, along with immediate negative media coverage that accused the villagers, in a phrase often used to quell the protests of the angry, of ‘disrupting the social order’.

Things escalated. After an octogenarian was publicly beaten by security forces, the public responded more forcefully: they took 38 hostages, including police. At this point, things have generally got far worse.

Such events are, if not common on a weekly basis, increasingly recurrent this decade. The government, whether provincial authorities or the central government in Hanoi, has struggled to deal with these crises and with petty and not-so-petty corruption. Land disputes stretch back decades. In banned book by author Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind, set in 1980s Hanoi, a village woman kills herself after the local fat cat expropriates her land. There were violent land disputes in the 1990s, and serious ones in the Central Highlands among ethnic minority groups fighting the government.

However, people are now more aware of their rights, and the internet means that many of these disputes are publicised and debated. The internet has ensured that such events are no longer localised and spread via haphazard word of mouth, but filmed and shared. There have been two very high-profile land stand-offs this decade: in one, a fish farmer turned folk hero and his family held back police with homemade weapons; in the other, 3,000 police and 1,000 villagers faced off over the loss of the villagers’ land to develop the $8 billion Eco Park on the outskirts of the polluted capital. This being Vietnam, cell phones were to hand, the footage quickly ended up YouTube, and, being Vietnam, the government first pretended that the footage wasn’t there and then countered that the whole thing had been faked by ‘hostile forces’. Eco Park went ahead and is now a ‘green’ luxury development for the wealthy and health conscious on the outskirts of the polluted capital.

Losses of homes and protests have occurred in cities, too, but not with the same frequency. One of the more famous cases involved residents being evicted from the historic Eden building in the centre of Saigon. Residents fought hard to stay, but the faded wartime beauty finally met the wrecking ball and was replaced by yet another shopping centre.

Farmers have been brutally treated by the central government and provincial governments in the past, and from all reports the treatment of the villagers leading up to this latest outbreak was aggressive, threatening and coercive. However, the hard-done-by farmers are a little like the ‘deserving poor’: as long as they protest, however angrily, but don’t engage in political activism there’s a chance that the full force of the law may not affect them.

Actual activists engaged in a strategic game don’t often get much leniency from the government, which sees them as a direct threat to its legitimacy. The Dong Tam farmers were engaged in a battle against corrupt local government, rather than the state itself. As it happened, the higher echelons of government stepped in. This common enough communist narrative—the powerful state disciplining the decadent provincial government to protect honest farmers and peasants—is often seen in China, too.

Social media is the driver behind much of this, though there’s little new there. The internet has been used by activists since it first came to Vietnam and blog laws were introduced a decade ago. However, platforms such as Facebook make sharing content and reposting viral memes that much easier.

There was a memorable event during the 2010 Hanoi Millennium celebrations, when the cache of fireworks meant for the last night of the celebrations blew up early and killed four people. Newspapers were told to pull the story the same day, but photos did the rounds on Facebook immediately (though the giant mushroom cloud was also a bit of a giveaway, too). A fish-kill saga, in which Taiwanese steel producer Formosa let toxic wastewater into the sea, resulting in an estimated 100 tonnes of dead fish on the central coast’s shores, mobilised people across the country to ‘choose fish’ online. And, before that, young activists banded together to stop the city felling Hanoi’s ancient trees.

In the case of Dong Tam, social media has now been kind to the government. Bloggers and Facebookers are pleased that Mayor Chung personally travelled to the village to negotiate. This has been seen as a bright spot and a change, but it will be worth watching what comes out of the review in a month and a half, and to see whether stronger interests will win out.