Vast swathes of the outback urgently need assistance to stem the crises that could pose a threat to national security and the economy if large parts of the harsh landmass become effectively abandoned, they warned.

Remote Australia already fits the criteria of failed states -- endemic poverty, a lack of services, financial mismanagement and high rates of homicide and violence -- according to excerpts of the report published in The Age and The Australian newspapers.

The group of prominent Australians, including academics, politicians, public servants and mining executives, has called for a radical rethink for the region that holds 65 percent of the nation's huge resources wealth.

"If we let communities die, that has implications for our mining industry, for our security and for the type of nation we are," said one of the experts, Peter Shergold, head of the Centre for Social Impact.

A succession of Australian governments were guilty of a "failure of vision and policy", Shergold, the Australian government's top bureaucrat until last year, told The Age ahead of the report's publication Monday.

The result is that declining populations and crumbling infrastructure are turning remote areas of Australia -- where 80 percent of the population lives on the east coast -- into a largely unsettled wilderness, the report said.

Large numbers of rural dwellers have been moving to Australia's large cities for several years as jobs dry up.

Abandoning remote Australia could raise the risk of a foreign invasion or of lucrative resources zones becoming contested as the land becomes largely abandoned, the report by the think-tank Desert Knowledge Australia claimed.

"It could be argued that our tenure of remote Australia under the present regime (fly-in, fly-out or relatively short term residence) in nature, which means that the vast resource zones could end up being contested, by virtue of the land being considered 'unsettled'," it said.

Former army chief Lieutenant General John Sanderson, told The Australian that a possible invasion did not necessarily mean a military push, but rather an influx of foreign capital and people into remote areas of Australia.

"Nature abhors a vacuum and so much of it (the country) is empty," he said, adding that it was imperative to maintain infrastructure and people in northern regions to ensure national security as the global powerbase shifts to Asian nations such as China and India.

The report points to the flight of trained and educated white Australians from remote regions due to social tensions with indigenous Aboriginal communities.

Aborigines largely remain outside the mainstream economy after centuries of white rule and whose communities suffer from high levels of alcoholism and violence but are increasingly moving into rural towns.

Last year, the government launched an intervention into remote Aboriginal communities in a bid to stem a tide of violence, substance and child abuse.

A former government minister and director of Reconciliation Australia, Fred Chaney, however said Aboriginal issues were not the core of the crisis and that it was worrying that an area so rich in resources was so poorly governed.

"This is not just about indigenous dysfunction, it is about dysfunction in strategically significant regions like the (resources-rich area of) Pilbara where the majority is the white community," he told The Age.

"You have a massive production of wealth and a complete disaffection with government," he said.

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