This is a fairly clear case of loss of control and international influence, an agenda not likely to be of benefit to Australian people.
Best of luck Ian, in your quest for commonsense and justice for the people.
The ongoing flooding in the Murray-Darling Basin, coming so soon after the decade-long ‘Millennium Drought’, is a stark reminder of the extreme variability of the Murray-Darling river system.
These events also illustrate why the proposed Basin Plan, predicated on allocating a fixed volume of water for irrigation and returning a fixed volume of water to the rivers, has been widely condemned as facile and insincere, and of failing to improve on the existing, discredited management regime.
The period since the Murray-Darling Basin Authority released its guide to the proposed plan, nearly two years ago, has been marked by sustained outrage from all quarters. The authority, under its current chair, political apparatchik Craig Knowles, has been accused of a lack of transparency and scientific dishonesty.
Few if any stakeholder groups have willingly embraced the proposed Basin Plan, and those that have indicated that they may are tending to do so in the belief, as stated by Craig Knowles himself, that his plan is “better than no plan at all” – hardly a ringing self-endorsement of a proposal which will direct the expenditure of over $9 billion of taxpayers funds.
It appears that both Mr Knowles and federal Water Minister Tony Burke have adjudged the proposed plan to be worthy precisely because it pleases no-one.
In the broader community, there is widespread frustration and “Basin Plan fatigue” as criticisms and counter-criticisms continue to saturate the debate and consensus seems hopelessly unattainable.
Many are now asking: as a nation, how have we arrived at this impasse?
An objective review of the constraints faced by the authority would likely conclude that it is doomed to fail in the task of protecting the river system for future generations of Australians – having been comprehensively hamstrung by the National Water Initiative and its shady pair of legislative minders, the Water Act 2007 and the Water Amendment Act 2008.
The National Water Initiative, the “enduring blueprint” for a water reform process dreamed up nearly 20 years ago by the then members of the Council of Australian Governments, has at its heart the establishment of a national water market and thereby the commoditisation, or de-facto privatisation, of water.
It is also founded on the belief that the market will ensure that water is directed to its “most economically efficient” use – a vague concept, largely untested at the time, and one that the mismanagement of the Murray-Darling during the recent drought did little to promote.
It is now known that, even in the worst of the drought, private and public storages in the basin held sufficient water to have provided vital support to the river system; however, the self-interest of the market, aided and abetted by state government inaction and Commonwealth impotence, operated against the national good and public interest at this critical time.
The cost of the ensuing ecological degradation of the South Australian section of the River Murray alone has been estimated at $790 million: a figure which does not include one cent of the $4.5 billion of public monies consumed by the construction and operation of the redundant desalination plant in Adelaide, and certainly none of the 20 billion taxpayer dollars tied up in the equally unnecessary Victorian desalination plant – projects now seen for what they truly are: knee-jerk responses by governments guilty of lamentable water stewardship.
Calls for a formal enquiry into the mismanagement of the Murray-Darling during the Millennium Drought grow ever stronger.
The principal aim of the authority is to manage the basin’s water resources in the national interest. However, following the release of the guide to the proposed Basin Plan, a concerted and sadly successful campaign was waged to require that the authority give consideration to local social and economic factors; a decision which snuffed out the statutory independence of the authority and terminally compromised its ability to make recommendations to government based solely on the health and sustainability of the rivers – and which was closely followed by the resignations of half the membership of the authority, including its chair and chief executive.
This determination was a major coup for pro-marketeers, most notably the irrigation sector. It was also manna to governments of all hues, allowing them to deflect, onto the authority, subsequent criticism of a long-overdue initiative, but one always destined to raise the hackles of irrigating agribusiness: a highly vocal group, prone to hyperbole – repeatedly warning of the collapse of Australia’s food security if water allocations in the basin are reduced.
In fact, analysis of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that, even in a good year, irrigating enterprises in the basin typically contribute only 15 per cent to the national value of agricultural output – with much of its product being inedible, water-addicted cotton. Tellingly, National Farmers’ Federation president Jock Laurie recently admitted that Australia currently exports around 60 per cent of its food production.
By the time the proposed Basin Plan was released in November last year, it was apparent that the authority under Craig Knowles had succumbed to the extreme pressure being exerted by political and corporate heavyweights wedded to the water market. Sound science had been usurped by a glut of non-binding and poorly defined aspirations.
The authority vicariously deemed the Darling to be functionally disconnected from the rest of the system, despite the fact that it contributes around 20 per cent to long-term basin inflows.
In a reprehensible back-flip, it is now proposed that groundwater reserves be exploited, largely negating any eventual reduction in surface-water diversions and rolling-out the red carpet for mining interests, including the environmentally and socially toxic extraction of coal seam gas.
The projected impacts of climate change, detailed in the guide to the proposed Basin Plan, were excluded from the proposed plan itself. Craig Knowles had begun to coin terms such as ‘localism’, widely construed as a process which will limit involvement in the roll-out of the plan to those groups most directly impacted by reduction in extractions, thus ostracising the general public, including the majority of non-irrigating communities.
In an act of supreme self-deprecation, the authority website now features a “mythbusting” section, which contains overt criticism of its very own guide to the proposed Basin Plan.
Most worryingly, the Commonwealth’s cynical expansion of the brief of the authority effectively relieves our parliamentarians of an essential duty: it is increasingly likely that, rather than formulating vital policy on the basis of high quality and truly independent data provided in the public interest by the authority and other relevant statutory bodies, Canberra will view the final plan submitted by Craig Knowles as a fait accompli for acceptance or rejection by Parliament: staggeringly lazy politics and an abrogation of due legislative process.
Far from promoting wise use of water as originally intended, the national water market threatens to derail any meaningful attempt to turn around the degradation of the Murray-Darling river system – damage on a scale that the recent floods alone cannot remediate – and prevent the overexploitation of the basin, especially during periods of low inflows.
It has driven the corporatisation of agriculture and landscape-scale destruction of the environment of the basin to develop vast, monoculture, irrigating industries: directly responsible for the salinisation and ecological impoverishment of the region. It also threatens the future of traditional family farmers, who typically have a much closer connection to the land and a greater understanding of the need for environmentally sustainable agricultural practices than entities whose primary interest is the stock market.
The current market-based approach to water is a misguided and dangerous experiment, devised and implemented by a succession of myopic state and federal governments apparently seeking to cede functional responsibility for water management and public water supply to the private sector.
It has directly promoted the ongoing surge of questionable public-private partnerships and the construction of unjustifiably costly and frequently unnecessary water infrastructure across the country, leading to untenable increases in public water charges – and an emphasis on fixed charging rather than consumption-based billing.
Communities worldwide have suffered as a result of failed attempts to impose market-based solutions to water management. The Australian water market now offers investment opportunities available in few other countries – and water speculators are moving quickly to reap the financial benefits.
In many instances this involves the purchase of water entitlements for on-selling to consumptive users at the highest possible price with no net benefit to the community; the most likely outcome being higher prices for domestically produced foodstuffs.
It should therefore come as no surprise that market-players will vigorously resist attempts to reduce water availability, including the token measures contained in the proposed Basin Plan, and will seek to promote consumption rather than wise use of our finite water resources.
Instead of directing water to its most ‘economically efficient’ use, the market merely dispenses it to those who can pay the price, irrespective of the use to which it will be put; a process which will increasingly favour corporate agribusiness and mining enterprises.
Recent above-average inflows have offered some respite, but it is inevitable that, most critically in the drier future predicted for the basin, the price of Australian water will increasingly be determined by big business. Recent comments by Trade Minister Craig Emerson only serve to confirm the political commitment to this end.
Our current constitution affords us no meaningful protection from the activities of the increasing number of private investment companies, both local and offshore, seeking to drive Australia’s water-wagon. Ignoring the fact that the United Nations has indicated that, in less than a decade, 1.8 billion people will suffer extreme water scarcity, as a nation we blindly continue to surrender control of water to the private sector.
The nation faces a stark choice between continuing passive acceptance of market-driven exploitation of a vital natural resource or insistence that governments reassume sole and transparent responsibility for our water future. The seemingly endless chaos and community schism surrounding the drafting of the Basin Plan is an inevitable consequence of the former.
Existing arrangements governing water management are ridiculously complex and frequently conflicting: they must be replaced with a coherent, single-tiered strategy.
There is no question that the nation requires a robust irrigation sector; however, the National Water Initiative was foisted upon Australia – its citizens thus far deprived of the right to determine whether they wish an essential and threatened natural resource to be treated as a globally tradeable commodity, or wisely managed as a public good.
Sincere governments would allow their electorates to decide whether to pull the plug on the National Water Initiative – a dysfunctional, divisive and socially inequitable venture which, far from protecting the national water resource for future generations, is obstructing any earnest attempt to do so – including the formulation of an effective Basin Plan.
Ian Douglas is national coordinator of Fair Water Use (Australia). View his full profile here.
The GOLDEN RULE 