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November 28, 2011
The claim of the recently released Murray-Darling Basin Authority's revised draft plan is that it aims to end decades of state squabbling over the management of Australia's biggest and most productive river system. Will it?
The proposal to return 2750 gigalitres a year to the river falls well short of the authority's recommendation in its "guide" to the basin plan last year, when it proposed the return of 3000 to 4000 billion litres a year. And the mechanism to claw back the water is coming from improving irrigation infrastructure rather than from water buybacks. The revision is Labor's political compromise of fix the irrigators win: they weakened the environmental proposals.
Is it too little too late?
From a South Australian perspective ("rivers die from the bottom up") the political fix or compromise does not protect the water quality of the river, nor does it addressed over-allocation by upstream irrigators who use 93 per cent of the river's water. It is deeply flawed and the intractable policy problems associated with reallocating water among users are not about to go away.
The irrigation lobby will still react negatively to this idea of increased environmental flows, arguing that they require certainty of water availability for production. In contrast the environmental lobby will point to the paucity of water to meet environmental needs and the resultant uncertain environmental gains.
It appears that the rain--the breaking of the drought---has helped to restore the river, but in the process it has washed away the reform momentum. However, the rain hasn't fixed the overallocation of Murray-Darling river system. It has not ended the prospect of future droughts. Nor does it tackle the long-term impacts of climate change on rainfall in the southern basin.
Ben Eltham points out that:
The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists estimates that pre-industrial water flows in the Murray Darling Basin were around 12,200 gigalitres. That sounds like a lot of water – and it is: one gigalitre is around 444 Olympic swimming pools. But irrigation, agriculture and other development has reduced this flow to approximately 4,700 gigalitres – just two-fifths of the pre-industrial total. This is not enough water to sustain a healthy river system, especially in times of sustained drought. Of the basin's 23 river valleys, 20 are in poor or very poor environmental health.
Climate change will only make matters worse: the CSIRO expects inland Australia to warm and dry as global temperatures rise. Future rainfalls across much of the southern Murray-Darling catchment are likely to be lower than present.
The current system is broken that the basin's rivers will dry up, the wetlands will die and many of the irrigation towns will die anyway, if the massive over allocation of irrigator's licences is not substantially addressed. In the meantime environmental degradation will be ongoing and continual.
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The irrigators are so predictable. They say the draft was a fraud and if adopted, would result in thousands of jobs being lost, an increase in food prices and communities being shut down. The Victorian irrigators say:
Irrigators, they say, have already given back so much of their water, and the plan fails to provide security for irrigation communities.
What needs to happen is that irrigators should get more water. After all the Murray Darling river system is a working river.