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July 2, 2008
The level of Lake Alexandrina, near the mouth of the River Murray is currently half a metre below sea level. If it drops to 1.2m below, as predicted if inflows to the Murray did not pick up, the exposed lake bed would become acidic. The South Australian Government has recently began pumping water from Lake Alexandrina into the smaller Lake Albert to avert that waterway reaching such a trigger point. Things are looking bad there.
Meanwhile COAG meets Thursday this week and the River Murray is on the agenda among other items once again. The Federal Government is proposing to lift the 4% cap on the amount of water that can be traded out of the irrigation district to speed up the process of returning water to to the Murray Darling. Victorian irrigators oppose this, as they fear that this will depopulate or even close down towns in their state. The Nationals repeat the message.
The Victorian Government, of course, stands behind its irrigators in resisting any reform, towards a market based approach despite its free market and can do rhetoric. Command and control is the governance style of the parochial, state based approach of the Victorian Farmers Federation when it comes to water. It's their water and no one else can have it is their position. So the Brumby Labor Government is aligned with the Nationals to block an increased role for the market in the Basin. It is concerned to get the best possible deal for Victorian irrigators and to hell with the river.
The core goal is to protect the productive irrigation industry at all costs. In the face of Victoria's recalcitrance towards market reform, Canberra should use its previous commitment of up to $1 billion towards the second stage of the Foodbowl Modernisation Project as a way to force Victoria's hand. CoAG is a test of both cooperative federalism and the process of reform under Rudd Labor.
Update: 3 July.
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting has signed off on the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) on $3.7 billion of projects to restore the health of the Murray River and it is being heralded as creating the vehicle for the long-term reform of the much challenged Murray-Darling Basin system. There is mention of lifting the 4% cap on water trading to 6% so that water can be traded to where it is needed. But that increase will take place a year from now.
If the IGA is the vehicle for long term reform in the Basin then the $3.7billion funding on water projects is about looking after irrigators: a $100 million in extra funding for irrigation projects in Victoria's Sunraysia area; $600 million for water projects in SA that are about basically building a pipeline from Tailem Bend to get irrigatrors in the lower Murray much higher quality water; and NSW?
How is this a success in restoring health to the river? Under the Murray-Darling basin agreement, only $170 million of the $3.1 billion in water buy-backs is scheduled for the 2008-09 financial year.
Update: 4 July
An editorial in The Age puts it well:
COAG's deferral of the Wong plan could be catastrophic for the lower lakes in particular. If there are insufficient flows of fresh water to flush out the increasingly saline lakes, Senator Wong and her state counterparts may have no alternative but to open the barrages that regulate tidal flows, and allow the sea to claim the lakes.In other words, at this COAG the states did not in fact put their conflicting interests aside in order to allow concerted action that would keep alive the lower reaches of Australia's only great river system.
It goes on to say that since COAG chose not to heed the urgent warnings in the scientific reports about the Murray-Darling Basin [in the wake of the South Australia's Murray-Darling Basin Natural Resource Management Board's advice, the Murray-Darling Commission's audit of the 23 rivers in the basin gave all but three of them poor or very poor ecological report cards], the leaders of Australia's governments could at least have shed the spin cloaking yesterday's official statements.
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Gary,
the irigators resisting market reform and keeping the water for themselves have proposed inundating the lakes with seawater by removing the Goolwa barrages that separate the freshwater lakes from the saline estuary below. They argue this would return the system to its natural state.
Is there flaw in this argument? It seems to me that the irrigstors in NSW and Victoria have given up seeing the River as a river and are content to let it become a series of irrigators pools.
Ecology cannot stand in the way of increased production.The irrigators have not changed their basic position since the 1880s. The Ramsar wetlands must, and should be, be sacrificied to protect irrigator communities along the river.