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June 18, 2008
The rains in the lower Murray-Darling Basin have been modest, irrigators are on a drip feed, the wetlands are dying and the lower Lakes near the Murray's Mouth continue to dry out.
Tandberg
Drought and climate change have forced south western Australians to realise we cannot take our water for granted. The basin is an arid one. We have traditionally relied on dams for our water supply. But dam-building in this country has all but ceased. With the decrease in rainfall, flows into dams have declined markedly because we can no longer rely on rainfall to fill our dams.
Asa Wahlquist in a feature article in The Australian draws out one implication of this changed situation:
irrigation needs a radical overhaul. Most of the watering systems were built and allocated during the wet decades of the 1950s to '80s. They were government-driven, subsidised and based on old beliefs - such as greening the desert - rather than on science or sound economic principles. The irrigation infrastructure in some parts of the country is old and not financially sound, wastes far too much water and earns far too little. Such systems do not have the resilience to survive climate change. Because governments set them up, governments - and that means all of us - must become involved in the solution. Some irrigation districts will have to be retired, which is no easy act when the channels' drying up means the end of local communities.
As the country dries out further and we continue to extract more and more water, so we will lose plants, trees and fauna before we realise we had them.
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The tide is turning isn't it?
Slowly but inevitably the message is spreading that the irrigation system we have is simply not sustainable or economic or desirable in any sense.
Pardon the analogy but the drip drip drip of reality is starting to spread into the media and no longer is it automatically assumed that the irrigators' preferred option is the only possible answer.
Really its only a matter of WHEN and to what extant the inevitable permanent cutting and capping of licences is enforced regardless of the irrigators' lobby's wishes.
However I do fear it will come too late, after irretrievable damage has been done, perhaps we are at that stage already.
The only criticisms I have with Walquist's article are these statements:
[1]Because governments set them up,..." which ignores the vested interest lobby groups that pushed for and benefited from government policies that were responding to such.
[2]Similarly "drying up means the end of local communities".
It doesn't, that is false. The economic significance of irrigators has consistently been overrated. Important definitely but to be placed in a context where service delivery to tourism and recreation, just to name one other major economic activity along the River Murray, is at least as important, probably more so and with a brighter future. Furthermore I see it as essential that a decrease in irrigation activity is tied to proper [deliberately ambiguous word] recompense for lost assets and income [as I have said before, there is no shortage of govt. money], if only to calm the hysteria a little, but also tied to job schemes in the communities to maintain such.
Jobs in social services for example, unskilled at first but with inbuilt training potential, could be usefully offered in local hospitals, schools, local government servicing, revegetation and local infrastructure schemes etc. Defitely not a waste of money.
I'm optimistic about the message spreading but not the time span of the response.