Over the summer of 2019-20, before Australians had heard of COVID-19, a thick veil of smoke settled over large swathes of the country and a strikingly large number of towns and rural areas approached or reached ‘Day Zero’. Those places were so short of water that it had to be carted in, at significant cost.
Both of these phenomena—the blanket of smoke, the towns running dry—might have seemed unimaginable for Australians right up until they happened. Once we had breathed the polluted air and seen the truck-borne water tanks, the previously unimaginable became unmistakable. We had been warned for many years. Now here was climate change, smacking us in the face. And then, after the drought and the fires, came the floods.
Next, the pandemic. Another disease had crossed over from the animal world to humans. We had been warned about this, too. A 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report1 told us that deteriorating biodiversity and ecosystem functions had both direct and indirect implications for public health, including that emerging infectious diseases in wildlife could be exacerbated by human activities like land clearing and habitat fragmentation.
In light of these crises—drought, flood, fires and a global pandemic—our nation and our peoples are looking towards an uncertain future and an immediate imperative for reconstruction.
Reconstruction evokes postwar scenes of countries making constitutional change, building major infrastructure and seeking to reconcile with the past, but a pandemic is not a war. Reconstruction in the current context is less about rebuilding physical capital that has been destroyed than about responding to many and varied effects on less tangible things, such as confidence, jobs in the services and care sectors, and certainty. Combined with the other great upheavals we have experienced recently, the pandemic is a clarion call to all of us to try to reconstruct not bombed buildings and infrastructure, but our entire society. For us, reconstruction is a time to imagine possible futures and to talk honestly about what it will take to construct them. Among the crucial issues we must grapple with as we seek to imagine and build our future is water security.
For communities to survive, for us to avoid the further degradation of ecosystems, and for Australians to flourish, we have to face up to the challenges of water security. This prompts the question: water security for whom? For those who are, in the reconstruction, imagining a more just society, surely the answer must be water security for all Australians.
The UN-Water definition of water security locates water in the centre of human and environmental flourishing. It sees water security as:
the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.2
An immediate issue in water security is Sustainable Development Goal 6: ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. This goal is fundamental to Australia, a wealthy and smart country that nonetheless has failed to make adequate provision to manage the water scarcity that has attended two long, debilitating, unprecedented droughts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. That became quite clear over summer as town after town cried out for help and spent vast amounts of money on water carting, and as city folk organised fundraisers and water drives to help their countrymen who were living in dried-out communities. And this is clear from the particular concerns about water quality, contamination and availability in remote Indigenous communities—concerns that have persisted for decades.
All Australian jurisdictions must confront the shortcomings that were laid bare over the summer. Infrastructure Australia’s 2020 priority list had for the first time a substantial focus on water, recommending the establishment of a national water strategy.3 With the federal government asleep at the wheel, it has fallen to this important agency to demonstrate national leadership on water. Given the time that has elapsed and the changes already observable as a consequence of climate change, it is unsurprising that a national water strategy, as conceptualised by Infrastructure Australia, would go beyond the scope of the 2004 National Water Initiative.
Infrastructure Australia suggested that the so-called National Water Grid Authority could be of some use in that regard, diplomatically omitting to note that ‘Authority’ is a misnomer. The federal government promised to create a statutory authority but did not do so; at the time of writing, the National Water Grid Authority seems to be little more than a departmental website and a map. This is after the Coalition government abolished the National Water Commission statutory authority in 2014, saying, ‘with the substantial progress already made in water reform and the current fiscal environment, there is no longer adequate justification for a standalone agency to monitor Australia’s progress on water reform’.4 This is the same government that has created a $2 billion National Water Infrastructure Loan Facility that did not spend any money at all in the two years following its announcement.
As the Climate Council has noted, climate change is shifting rainfall patterns and making droughts and floods more severe.5 The council is far from alone in recognising the impact of climate change on water. A long time ago, at the dawn of the climate wars, then-prime minister John Howard said, in a speech announcing his government’s National Plan for Water Security, ‘the current trajectory of water use and management in Australia is not sustainable. In a protracted drought, and with the prospect of long-term climate change, we need radical and permanent change.’ The politics of the forthcoming 2007 election required even a Liberal prime minister to talk about climate change.
But in the years following, as the climate wars gathered steam, the Coalition became ever more riven with disagreement about climate change. Rather than responsibly reining in the deniers within its own ranks, the government found it expedient to attack Labor on our climate change policies, including, very recently, our target of net zero emissions by 2050. This has given tacit endorsement to denialism and has had real-world adverse consequences for domestic action and international leadership on climate change.
Outside the realm of electoral politics and the culture war, however, people whose livelihoods depend on water security are coming to grips with the realities of climate change and its impact on water. So, too, are academics, experts and community leaders such as the coordinator-general for drought, Major General Stephen Day, whose April 2019 report Advice on a Strategy for Drought Preparedness and Resilience acknowledged the impact of climate change ‘making water availability less predictable and secure’. Citing the CSIRO, the report stated:
As a consequence of climate change drought is likely to be more regular, longer in duration, and broader in area. It means that farmers and communities who rarely see drought are likely to see it more often. And those that have been managing drought for many years may now see it intensify beyond their lived experience. Ultimately, the nation could see some areas of Australia become more marginal and unproductive.6
Infrastructure Australia also noted the impact of climate change in its proposal for a National Water Strategy, referred to above, as did the interim inspector-general of the Murray-Darling Basin, Mr Mick Keelty AO, in his report Impact of Lower Inflows on State Shares under the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement;7 and many other voices have been raised about the intersections between climate change and water security.
The facts about the impact of climate change on water security present us with choices. As a country, we should choose to plan for water scarcity, and right now, urgently, we should choose to take real action on climate change at home and show leadership internationally.
The variability of water availability and increasing concerns about water security have economic impacts. Agriculture is already the largest user of water in Australia, ‘accounting for around 70 per cent of water extractions’.8 The National Farmers’ Federation, in its 2030 Roadmap,9 aims to exceed $100 billion in farm-gate output by 2030. NFF president Fiona Simson has said that with a business-as-usual approach, that output would be $80 billion by 2030. To grow sustainably, the NFF believes its sector needs a 20 per cent increase in water-use efficiency for irrigated agriculture by 2030. As a matter of logic, the intention to increase production above business-as-usual output through greater water efficiency implies more production per unit of water, not less water use by agriculture and a corresponding freeing-up of water for other uses (environmental, urban).
In the Murray-Darling Basin, where a majority of Australia’s agricultural production occurs and where climate change and weather phenomena mean there seems to be less water to go around, it is obvious that there is pressure on both water availability and economic output. It is also clear that water policy, governance and management need to adapt to these changes while still providing confidence, stability and certainty.
As the UN-Water definition makes clear, water security goes beyond water availability, and of course its underpinnings go beyond economic concerns. They go to quality, quantity, purpose, ecosystem preservation, wellbeing and the avoidance of damaging conflict, among other things. Water scarcity and shifting rainfall patterns, as well as the severe recent droughts, have a substantial and detrimental impact on the environment10 and on vulnerable plants and animals, including endemic species. In addition, a lack of water security poses health risks such as contamination and increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases. During drought you need only to talk to farmers whose livelihoods are being threatened and whose communities are being torn apart to understand the potential for deep and lasting harmful mental health effects. And the impact on the social and political fabric of towns and rural areas should not be ignored.
The UN-Water definition refers to ‘peace’ for good reason. Water scarcity has been a factor in violent conflict, with some attributing conflict in Syria, Yemen and other places to it, at least in part. Of course there is no equivalence in Australia, but it is worth noting that water scarcity has already given rise to other types of conflict and disruption here. In recent years in the Murray-Darling Basin, we have seen the twin phenomena of acutely felt water insecurity and a broader democratic malaise translate into protests, National-on-National clashes11 and political grandstanding, increases in anti-major-party votes, expressions of distrust in water-related institutions and government institutions more generally, at least one case of someone bringing a noose to a demonstration, and the unceremonial dumping of an effigy of a former water minister into the Murray.
Aside from the contribution of water-related aggravations to social conflict, one of the (many) problems with a decline in trust in institutions is that it makes those institutions’ actions less effective, with real-world consequences. Just as central bank credibility affects monetary policy’s effectiveness12 (because households’ and firms’ behaviour is affected by whether they believe the bank is committed to its mandate), people’s behaviour in response to decisions and advice from institutions is likely to be affected by their trust in those institutions.
We have seen this demonstrated during the pandemic. A local example: it has been argued that a lack of trust in government contributed to a lower take-up of the COVIDSafe app than might otherwise have been the case. The effectiveness of the app was dependent on the proportion of the population willing to use it. So a lack of trust in government appears to have made an anti-COVID measure less effective.
Having said that, Australians seem to have greater trust in government, and seem to have fared better as a consequence, than citizens in some other countries. Internationally, it has been argued that political trust affects compliance with COVID-19 containment measures. Private research firm Edelman explicitly drew a connection between a general lack of trust in government and the reduced effectiveness of the COVID-19 response in many countries:
These last few weeks we have all lived the consequences of low trust in government and media. We have observed that large groups of people have ignored critical health guidance, in part because they doubted the veracity of available information or because they relied on disinformation.13
The ramifications for water policy and governance are obvious. For people to accept and act on institutional and government advice, and for people to comply with the rules, it is not just social licence but credibility that is needed. That is why it is crucial that any discussion of water security contain consideration of how to maintain and improve public trust in agencies and institutions, and in the capacity of governments to be a force for positive change.
Concerns have been raised about the decline in trust. Infrastructure Australia, in its priority list for a national water strategy, noted that the 2019 Australian Infrastructure Audit had identified ‘that a number of events, such as the Menindee fish kill, ha[d] undermined confidence in the governance and management of Australia’s water resources’. Similarly, the interim inspector-general’s report referred to above stated:
It was … observable that stakeholder perceptions were frequently at odds with what the inquiry heard from States and agencies with responsibilities in the Basin. This highlights the challenge that remains in communicating the right information to Basin communities effectively. Improving the transparency, accessibility and availability of information—as well as people’s ability to interpret and understand it—needs to be a focus. The differing perceptions also point to a deficit in trust and confidence in Basin management. There is an opportunity for all parties to demonstrate greater unity and leadership, which will be essential if future challenges are to be met successfully.
The warning signs should not be ignored. Governments should demonstrate that they are capable of restoring confidence in our institutions, in everyone’s interests.
Water security is a great source of concern for Australians. We live on the driest inhabited continent. We have increasing demand for water as the population increases and water-reliant industry (including but not limited to agriculture) seeks to grow, and we are facing the uncertainty and availability constraints that come with climate change. These circumstances remind us that there is substantial work ahead if we want future generations to have the water security to live healthy, safe, peaceful and prosperous lives.
We must come together as a nation to continue to work through our state and regional differences on water to secure Australia’s future prosperity, and water security for all Australians. COVID-19 has demonstrated our immense capacity to collaborate and support each other. What is needed now is long-term political leadership to get it done. Evidence of our reforming spirit, collaborative approach, and capacity to deliver certainty in critical areas of Australians’ lives is all around us: in Medicare, superannuation, renewable energy, better jobs, and our country’s record of continuous economic growth. Labor is up for this challenge.