2010
This writer lived for a decade by the Murray at Albury, regularly numbed by a babble of voices offering opinions that never reached resolution. There was at one time – and it remains gob-smacking to relate – a serious view that the river should be allowed to become a drain for the effluent of all the towns along its length, a fresh-water pipe running alongside to supply human needs.
The problem has always been that in this great dry continent, there are so many competing voices and interests. And almost all of them, one way or another, have rational foundations.
The Murray-Darling Basin, which covers one-seventh of our nation’s land, produces a third of all our food, and a lot of it comes from farms irrigated from the river system.
A substantial cut in irrigation entitlements, farm groups contend, will not only destroy farm incomes but threaten national food security. And for every farmer who might receive a government payout to walk away, scores more who rely on the dollar-go-round from agriculture –farm workers, machinery suppliers, shopkeepers, car sales people and all the rest – are likely to go to the wall uncompensated.
Ecologists, however, maintain that the river system’s health has long been dangerously compromised by too much water being siphoned off by those irrigators. Current and future irrigation allocations, a clamour from the environmental and scientific communities insists, simply cannot be sustained and must be reduced.
Leaders of state governments nod sagely, and then resume traditional headbutting over who is the most responsible or irresponsible. Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia all blame each other.
Queensland allows too much water to be bled off the headwaters and feeder rivers of the Darling. NSW hoards the Darling’s water in the shallow Menindee Lakes and jealously guards the rights of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation District, even though the Murrumbidgee regularly is so depleted it hardly flows at its juncture with the Murray. Victoria plans to pipe water to Melbourne from the Murray-Goulburn system, arguing it is actually saving irrigation supplies by modernising and making the northern grid more efficient. South Australia fumes that it gets the rough end of everything, even though Adelaide and other cities and towns in the state have long happily relied on pumping the river’s water over hills to slake residents’ thirst.
Treasury officials stare balefully at the $9 billion already spent to try and fix the mess – without much return – and wonder where the extra $2 billion will come from to buy water allocations under proposals currently being batted about.
Politician-farmers such as Senator Bill Heffernan say farming should be moved to the monsoon-fed north, National Party MPs have spent decades insisting the cap on irrigation allocations is too mean, old timers argue that the nation’s northern rivers should be turned inland – and every few decades, drought and the studies of science and ecology remind us that the plight of the river system is becoming more dire.
Is it really beyond our national imagination to grasp that the breaking of a drought has provided us a period of respite to reach agreement that without a healthy river system we can have no reliable agricultural economy, and without a robust agricultural economy we cannot properly fund a healthy river system, and to seek – for the first time since Federation – a workable series of compromises, even though no one might be entirely happy?
Or are we content to consign Mr Percival and the Coorong to mere scribbles on the sand, wind-talk and wave-talk, memories of what there once was, and what we allowed to die?
‘Keep the water ideas flowing’,
Sydney Morning Herald, October 9, 2010