Towards sustainable pastoralism in Australia's rangelands

This paper outlines an approach to identifying regions of the Australian rangelands that should be resilient under grazing and where pastoralism may be sustainable due to sufficiently dependable productivity and profitability. It suggests that if grazing is not phased out as a primary land use in non-resilient regions, then they will continue to experience serious decline. It is argued that policy paralysis has come about because of the false assumption (in practice if not rhetoric) that the problems of one region are the same as those of another. Management would improve if governments engineered policies to give private enterprise freedom to pursue profit in resilient environments, and to provide for greater public management in regions where unreasonable levels of altruism are required to meet the goal of sustainable land use.