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September 27, 2006
I watched the ABC’s Two Men in a Tinnie last night. The poor old Darling. It is highly regulated and barely flows. It's not just the drought --it is corporatized irrigated agriculture taking too much water out of the river. It is highlighted by Cubbie Station in Queensland, in the headwaters of the upstream in the Darling-Murray system being surrounded by water, but over the border in NSW, downsteam from Cubbie, there are properties that once had floods every year for a 100 years, but now haven’t seen a flood in years. The Beattie government allowed the huge Cubbie station water harvesting scheme.
unknown Courier Mail
The establishment of a national Office of Water Resources is a good step forward to ensure a federal focus and co-ordination of water issues. Having Malcolm Turnbull running it is much better than some National Party hack who rants on about greenies, even though Turnbull's market approach (the price of water will rise, a water trading system, private investment in water infrastructure) will primarily benefit agribusiness. Water consumers have little say in this process and the market will not deliver environmental flows to the Murray-Darling system. Governments must intervene to ensure that.
We do have the COAG Water Reform Framework and the National Water Initiative (NWI), which outline the way forward for meeting our future water needs. This focuses on reforms to improve how we manage water including introducing trading options will allow water to move to its higher value uses. Yet t here has been little--no---progress on restoring environmental flows to the River Murray despite the Commonwealth putting in $500 million. There is still no sustainable water policy even though climate change means hotter temperatures and less water in the lower Murray-Darling Basin.
What we saw on Two Men and a Tinnie was that the rural regions are already facing extremely low levels of water supply--- eg. Wilcannia in western New South Wales. Similarly in central and southern Queensland, and in regional cities, such as Goulburn. That looks like the future. The state governments are relying heavily on demand management in the cities as a means of meeting future water needs, even though water restrictions and other demand management strategies can only help to constrain demand in the short term. Without additional supply, restrictions are ineffective in constraining water demand for the long-run. Though recycling water in the capital cities is one of the most effective means of reducing the amount of water drawn from our rivers, few state governments are committed to investing in that in any substantive way.
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"The Beattie government allowed the huge Cubbie station water harvesting scheme"
I think you will find that the water rights for Cubbie station were in existence long before the election of Beattie. If we were serious about the Darling, the Federal Government would buy out the owners of Cubbie.