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August 7, 2008
The ecological state of the River Murray is now pretty dire.The condition is most noticeable in the lower lakes are near the Murray's mouth in SA, where I have been photographing this last week.
Valdmann
Unbelievably, the Rann Government in SA is spinning the ecological disaster in the Lower Lakes of the Murray River in the form of water dreaming. It is painting a rosy future even as it plans to built a weir at Wellington to protect Adelaide's water supply. This is one issue where the state government's spin is at odds with reality. As a response to the community protests on the issue, its spin highlights its failure on water issues and its strong greenwashing. Lake Alexandrina is now 35cm below sea level, and acidification would be triggered at negative 1m, which is estimated in June 2009.
In contrast, Senator Wong, the federal Water Minister, has effectively written off the lakes, saying there was not enough water in the River Murray system to fill them:
There is not enough water in the system to bring down the sorts of quantities of water you'd need to fill the Lower Lakes.Even if we did make a decision to not give any allocations (upstream), there is insufficient water currently in storage – less the critical human needs issue – for us to viably manage the Lower Lakes with the amount of water that we have. That is extremely unfortunate and extremely difficult for the community down there.
What water there is left in NSW and Victoria--we don't know how much---has been reserved for critical human needs (drinking water) along the River Murray. A weir is quietly being built at Wellington to preserve the drinking water by preventing the sea water plume that has got beneath the Goolwa barrages from going upstream. A recent estimate by CSIRO scientist Bill Young was that up to 50% of water released from Menindee Lakes would reach the lower Murray. So how much water is reserved in NSW?
Maywald has been denying that work on the weir is underway when she has been addressing local communities in the Lower Lakes this week. She is still talking in terms of a freshwater solution and the possibility of adequate rain falling next winter. She is saying nothing about the annual 4% trading cap has already been reached on the Campaspe River in central Victoria, which flows into the Murray, and that a major water acquisition has been rejected because it will breach the cap – barely a month into the financial year.
Odd that the Rann Government is putting no public pressure on NSW or Victoria, nor even calling for a public audit of water reserves in the NSW. Their silence and spin means that they have been bought off at CoAG.
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I thought the story was that nobody knew how much water was in storage, or does that only apply to the water that could fall under the buyback scheme nobody seems particularly interested in?
It will be interesting to see how much worse this has to get before action is taken. Horrible, but interesting.