Ya ??? Freshwater in the desert. https://www.lakeargyle.com/history-statistics-environment/ord-river-irrigation-scheme/
I strongly suspect that Australia's motivation has less to do with water shortage than with its immigration policies. The reality is that Australia could easily accommodate another 100M people around its coastal zone. It doesn't because they anticipate that the make up of that population would more likely be greater Asian and Australia would lose its white western identity. After living in Australia, I came to revise my classification of what a great country is. I'd always considered one to be where the population has a decent standard of living. I'd never lived in a country where government went out if its way to limit population growth. Of course it's easy for Australia to have such a high standard of living when so few people live selfishly on such a high pile of gold. The US standard of living may be far lower, but at least it provides a decent living for 330M people, Europe for 450M people and east Asia for at least 400M people. Those are in my eyes far greater achievements.
No country is obligated to take in people just because it's got some extra land. Every country has the right to decide how many people it allows to be inside its border very much like you have the right to decide how many people you want to let in into your own house. Just because your house has some extra unused rooms doesn't mean that you have to now open your door far and wide and let in all the people from outside. And mind you, 99% of the people who go to Australia are not refugees, people who absolutely have no choice but to flee from their countries and settle in Australia. And I feel bad for Europe for taking in all those migrants too. Seriously if there are problems in those migrants' native countries, then the correct solution is to fix these problems in those countries not a band-aid solution of just making all the citizens of the troubled countries to go land at the border of the other European countries and force them to take them in. That's veiled terrorism and invasion. How would you like it when bunch of people show up outside your door and just sit there and refuse to leave?
You like to simplify things, don't you... Interconnectedness is the reality you may not like, unless it works your way, but it's far safer than isolation. America became a superpower because of its global expansion, economically, culturally and politically. American strength has always been its willingness to let people in to make a better life for themselves and we have many, many examples to prove this regardless of what Trumpist white nationalist tell you.
If Israel can grow vegetables in the desert, Australia should be able to get fresh water. Australia can do it!! Let's go!!
Yes I like to simplify things. Things are very simple if you really get down to the nitty gritty of it. People like to complicate things unnecessarily, and many times for their own agenda, I find. Immigration is just like globalization. It's not for everyone and it affects every country differently. People look at America and think it's the ultimate success story for immigration. That is not entirely correct. America's strength isn't its willingness to let people in to make a better life for themselves. No. America's strength is its ability to make the people that it allowed into the country to create value. It's not immigration that created America's wealth. It's that America is able to sell what its immigrants have made for the highest amount of money over the cost that it pays for immigration. Immigration isn't free. Immigrants incur cost and high cost as opposed to what people think. Whether immigration will benefit the receiving country will depend on whether the marginal value of what that one more unit of immigrant produces is higher than the marginal cost of what it takes to "maintain" sort of speak that one more unit of that immigrant. In other words, if you can't sell what that immigrant produced for a value higher than how much you are paying to keep him/her around, then immigration is not for you. You are far better off closing your border and just produce whatever you can to sustain your location population and live a simple, stress-free life. It's that simple. And this applies to every single country in the world, including America. It has nothing to do with safety, nothing to do with nationalism...These are smokescreens. All it boils down to is $$. Even for America, why do you think America is discouraging illegal immigration? Why? Because it's not able to sell what extra immigrants to its country has made for $$ higher than the cost of keeping them around due to competition and sometimes unfair trade agreements and abuse thereof from countries like *cough* China.