Indeed Australia has pioneered the two classic multiple land use regimes of modern times. Both of these regimes encourage multiple use of the system with an emphasis on the conservation of biodiversity. So far, I have concentrated on the physical aspect of land use. In Australia, at least, and probably in the rest of the developed world, land use is the front line of sustainable development. It is where sustainable development issues are made concrete and where they are fought out.
Land use is where sustainable development gets real.
Sustainable development is itself a difficult area. It is a democratic response to the often competing demands of economic development and environmental protection. The inherent nature of these issues, as recent history has shown, are such that we must expect that there will be strongly held and widely different views through the community on any particular land use issue. We now have the physical and social context to be able to sketch out the specifications for integrated land use tools, or land use decision support systems in the modern jargon. And already we can see that these will be tools of some complexity, more Swiss army knife than digging stick.