It’s Time: Fueling a Fair Go for Rural Regions

Australia’s great unspoken contract has always been simple: the country does its bit for the city, and the city returns the favor. It’s the rhythm of the fair go — a handshake across the wheatbelt and the wharf, a sense that when the work’s shared, the reward should be too.

Lately, that balance’s been slipping. The bush keeps producing — food, fibre, minerals, ideas — while the value of those efforts drifts away to the cities, to multinationals, to somewhere else. It’s a familiar story across the world’s heartlands — from the prairies of Canada to the plains of India and the cornfields of the American Midwest. Hands and soil still hold up the economy, yet prosperity too often flows in the opposite direction.

But this time, the people of the bush aren’t retreating deeper into the Never Never, chasing opportunity in higher yields or cheaper land — the usual goals of rural resilience.

This time, they’re turning toward the cities they’ve long served, not exactly quoting Midnight Oil’s words but certainly invoking their spirit, challenging the cities to recognize: The time has come — to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share.

They’re doing it not with protest signs, but with seed drills and soil — and a new report out of Australia has turned that quiet demand for fairness into a national industrial plan: the Low-Carbon Liquid Fuels Roadmap.

The New Boom Beneath Our Boots

Out of the paddocks comes a quiet revolution.
The Roadmap, released by the Grains Research and Development Corporation, sets out how Australia can grow its own future fuels — renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel made from crops like canola, mustard, safflower, and lupin.

It’s a vision summed up in five words that could hang on any shearing-shed wall:

“The next oil boom’s on the farm.”

That’s no figure of speech. Australia already exports around six million tonnes of canola a year — roughly two million tonnes of oil feedstock. Most of it’s refined overseas. The Roadmap shows how to turn that flow around, anchoring regional refineries and jobs at home while decarbonising the nation’s transport fleet.

Three Horizons, One Promise

The plan unfolds like a series of harvests:

• Horizon 1 — Plant and Prosper. Lift yields, expand canola acreage, and bring back hardy cousins like juncea mustard for the dry zones. Every extra tonne means more local feedstock and more regional income.
• Horizon 2 — Innovate and Intensify. Use genetics and agronomy to raise oil content and develop oilseed lupin— a uniquely Australian legume that fixes its own nitrogen and lowers carbon intensity.
• Horizon 3 — Transform and Thrive. Pioneer biomass oil crops that store energy not just in seed but in leaf and stem — effectively photosynthesising fuel.

Together, they form a ladder from the here-and-now to the horizon — from more of what we know to what only Australia could invent.

At a Glance: What the Roadmap Proposes

• Feedstock First. Prioritise domestic oilseed production as the foundation of Australia’s low-carbon fuel industry.
• Scale Up. Expand canola and mustard acreage; introduce drought-resilient and high-oil varieties.
• Diversify. Reintroduce safflower, sunflower, linseed, and juncea canola in marginal zones.
• Innovate. Develop oilseed lupin and other legumes to reduce input costs and carbon intensity.
• Reimagine. Advance biomass oil crops that store fuel in stems and leaves.
• Secure Sovereignty. Build domestic HEFA and ATJ refining capacity to keep value, jobs, and security onshore.
• Policy Align. Create clear mandates, market parity mechanisms, and rural investment incentives to accelerate the build.

Think of it as a National Energy Crop Plan — one that binds agronomy, industry, and independence into a single field-to-fuel system.

GTESI Readout: How the System Evolves

Under the General Theory of Evolutionary Systems & Information (GTESI) lens, the roadmap is not just an industrial plan — it’s a persistence engine in motion:

GTESI Verdict:
The roadmap scores high on persistence, feedback coherence, and entropy export. It channels biological logic into industrial structure — a field system evolving toward maximum resilience and minimum waste.

In short, it’s nature’s efficiency, scaled for nationhood.

Fair Go Economics

There’s a sturdy logic behind the lyricism.
A domestic biofuel industry keeps money, talent, and trust circulating in the regions that generate the feedstock. Instead of exporting unprocessed value and re-importing finished fuel, we’d capture the refining, the freight, the maintenance — the heartbeat of rural prosperity.

It’s not protectionism; it’s participation. It’s the fair go, expressed in litres.

A nation built on distance needs its rural lifelines strong. Every litre refined in Dubbo or Whyalla replaces one imported through a strait or canal half a world away. Every crush plant in the Riverina or the WA wheatbelt means apprenticeships, diesel fitters, and scientists living where the crops grow.

Mateship in Motion

There’s another word for this — mateship.
Not sentimentality, but mutual reliance. You pull me out of the bog this season, I’ll help rebuild your fence next.

That spirit underpins this Roadmap. It says to the cities: we’ll grow the fuel for your planes, trains, and trucks — if you’ll back the refineries, the policies, and the long-term demand that make it worth our while.

Mateship built the Flying Doctor, the rural fire brigades, the co-ops and credit unions. It can build a fuel industry too.

The Return of Optimism

If this sounds less like an energy plan and more like a national renewal, that’s because it is.
Some readers may hear a familiar echo — the refrain of 1972, when Australians sang “It’s Time.”

That campaign wasn’t about grievance; it was about hope. It promised care, fairness, possibility. The new Roadmap carries the same tone, tuned for our century: rural regions asking not for handouts but for partnership — a fair share of the prosperity they create.

Half a century later, the soundtrack might swap Billy Thorpe for Paul Kelly, but the spirit’s the same — a country ready to look after its own. And if we’re talking soundtracks, there’s room for a little Up There Cazaly too — the underdog’s anthem that says, “Give it a go, you good thing.” Because that’s what this is: a chance for rural Australia to take the mark and play on.

Beyond the Island Continent

The beauty of this story is that it travels.
Every nation with a countryside can sing along — from Iowa to the Indo-Gangetic Plain, from Saskatchewan to the Pampas. Each has its own version of the fair go: the understanding that those who feed and fuel the nation deserve a fair return.

The Australian Roadmap offers a playbook for any government serious about tying climate action to regional renewal:
start with local feedstock, build processing where the crops are grown, keep the value chain in-country, and measure success not just in megajoules but in communities revived.

This isn’t charity. It’s sovereignty with manners — decarbonisation that strengthens, not hollows out, the places that make it possible.

Hope, Not Heat

We’ve heard the angry songs of energy transition — the ones that rage against what’s been lost.
This tune is different. It hums with optimism. It says the future can taste of diesel and sunlight together; that innovation can smell like rain on dry soil.

The Roadmap’s vision doesn’t pit city against bush, tech against tractor, or green ambition against economic sense. It ties them together like a good boundary fence — strong, flexible, and built to last.

The Final Verse

When the first litre of Australian-grown low-carbon jet fuel rolls out of a country refinery — perhaps from a plant built on the bones of an old mill — it will mark more than an industrial milestone.
It will prove that the fair go still works: that when city and country pull in the same harness, the whole nation moves forward.

Because the country’s done its bit for the city, time and again.
Now it’s time — quietly, confidently, unmistakably — for the city to do its bit for the country. C’mon, Aussie, C’mon. Let’s make it the world’s song.