User:Steveirons/sandbox

Steve Irons is a generalist technical writer, working on projects in Australia and around the world for some 40 years. He is responsible for the docDownload project that has been going on the Internet for some 20 years now, and this was one of the first legal and business administration template providers in the Western world. He made a presentation to the Rudd government's Australia_2020_Summit on the FOWTOR model designed by him to take Australian regionalism a step forward, from its initial focus on products and marketing, to a form of geographic regionalism considered necessary as we enter a period of huge changes happening due to climate change.

FOWTOR focuses on water. The importance of water in Australia, the driest continent in the world, is not at issue. But as the risk of disaster increases as we move into 2030/50, not enough is done, he argues, to move the focus to the regions, where responsibility and resources can be given to those who have the power to properly plan for the disasters that will happen over the next 30 years.

Water impacts on increasing bushfires, drought, heavy rain, cyclones, flooding, sea level rises, damaged reef systems, renewable energy, sustainable development, and the part played by national forests and agriculture in the continuous calls for increased economic development.

FOWTOR defines 31 regions, which include 5 sub-regions, and a number of clusters, which he calls super-regions, which define a role for major local governments around Australia to do their contingency plans, and do real development projects in preparation for disaster recovery which will become more and more urgent as we move towards 2030 and 2050.

The federal government cannot provide this detailed planning and development, and the state governments fail to appreciate the inherent differences of their regions, seeing them basically as ubiquitous and as there to serve interests of the capital in its development of economic wealth and opportunity in the State. Leadership in the regional capitals understand these differences inherently and are capable of providing real change as it is needed. Which will be inherently different, depending upon which region they are operating in.

His FOWTOR map moves the focus of key regional centres away from their traditional focus (which was always dominated by their urban boundaries) to the flow of water from the top of the ridge, down the river (which the urban centres are inevitably located on), all the way to the sea and even out to the edge of the Australian Continental shelf. The benefits of shifting this focus from the States and Territories that were always based on political colonial structures in the late 19th century at the time of the formation in of the Australian nation state in 1901 to a regional focus cannot be overstated, he says. The boundaries developed by CSIRO and BOM under their NRM project came up with the same overall climatic regions as FOWTOR, completely independent of FOWTOR, but some 10 years after FOWTOR developed its boundaries. This is to be expected because, when FOWTOR was put together, BOM focused its reports and predictions on state and local weather data analytics with no overall national modelling and NRM was set up to bring it all together under one model. While FOWTOR focussed on the water after it hits the ground and what happens to it on its journey to the sea, NRM focussed on the water coming out of the sky, so the similarities in the boundaries were inevitable.

While there was no initial intention for the FOWTOR model to define Indigenous boundaries, the boundaries defined by FOWTOR line up very closely to Indigenous nations' boundaries defined over thousands of years. Highlighting these and showing how they fit in the FOWTOR region assists us in defining regional differences, and were useful during the recent discourse on the Voice. This should have been expected because of the importance of water to the development of their nations, but the alignment was still a surprise.

An interesting essay on using FOWTOR to analyse the history of regionalism and aboriginality in Australia is given on the FOWTOR website at https://www.bloggerme.com.au/borders-frontiers-and-boundaries-australian-prespective.

Recent mapping using new scientific apps on such matters as sea-level rises give frightening results which add to the urgency of employing FOWTOR to move responsibility and resourcing away from Canberra and away from Spring Street etc. to regional players who are in a position to make a real difference.