Speech to the 3rd Shed a Tier Congress
Parliament House, Canberra, March 22, 2002:
The Murray Darling Beyond Federation
How the Murray Darling Basin and the Australian Environment
generally have suffered under our present system of government,
and visions for environmentally sustainable government
Catherine Moore
I want to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people - the traditional owners of this land, who recognised the importance of water for life and who were here long before we came and introduced systems of government and legislation that have effectively threatened the health and survival of the ecosystems of this country.
We're only here today at all thanks to this - water. Water is the one thing above any other that links all of us, and without it we'd be dead in a week. Yet despite the fact that this is the most fundamental basic necessity which allows not only us but all the other living things on Earth to survive, we have mismanaged it to the extent that we are now suffering the consequences, and will continue to do so until we change our attitudes.
No-one would argue that we all have a right to clean water. But surely it does not end there, because with all rights come responsibilities. It is this above all that I believe is the key to ensuring adequate water supplies to all. To me, it is really obvious, and probably to you. But why hasn't it been obvious to the legislators who together have helped bring about the situation that we now find ourselves in in this country:
where we are continuing to grow crops in areas that are unsuitable and as a result allow rivers to run perilously low or even dry to ensure there will be enough water for large-scale irrigators,
where we continue to clear land at a frightening rate, despite the problems of dryland salinity that result from such actions,
where rainwater tanks were frowned upon in many urban areas until recently, and
where we let storm water and sewage go out to sea, instead of changing it into something that is useable. To name but a few examples.
And, why do we keep electing governments who have shown little more than contempt for the environment, exemplified by
the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 which hands over environmental powers to the states,
this government's insistence on promoting greenhouse gas emissions by its support for the fossil fuel industry and its refusal to commit to ratifying the Kyoto protocol, ganging up instead with the US to argue for, of all things, an increase in emissions, and, most recently,
the RFA Bill, which was guillotined through the Senate at 1.30 am last Friday and which locks the Commonwealth out of looking after forests, exempts any forestry logging from Environmental Assessment by the Commonwealth, and if the Commonwealth decides it does want to do an EA because of a threatened species, for example, the companies and states involved are able to get compensation. And, as has been the case since before the RFAs, there is still no cap on the amount of woodchips or sawlogs able to be mined from these magnificent, dwindling forests.
While growth and development continue to be the driving force and underlying philosophy that guide government decision-making, we are never going to change. But we cannot blame governments alone. As I just mentioned, we are the ones who keep re-electing them, for of course the growth ethic dominates our wider society (or should that be economy?) as well. And we can also attribute our insistence on re-electing the same old parties (which many people feel are pretty much the same these days) to the general attitude and apathy to politics and politicians.
So isn't it time we had a long hard look at the way we do politics, and the way we make decisions, and try to improve the system?
Doing politics differently. For me, this has a lot to with focusing on the issues and not on the personalities. Which brings into question the whole operation of these chambers near us here. They are set up for people to be adversarial. It is no wonder that voters feel so cynical about their elected representatives when they see them abusing each other across the chamber every time parliament meets. Is it not possible to sit down and discuss problems and make decisions based on information for the best outcomes?
Senate inquiries are another example of what needs to change. It is appalling that we have a system set up that allows inquiries into various issues, yet the government of the day has usually already made up its mind about the direction it will take before the committee sits. The inquiry into the Jabiluka uranium mine is a case in point. I sat and watched those giving evidence, watched the contempt and indifference and ignorance shown by some Senators to many of these people and watched when, despite the huge amount of evidence against the mine, the government gave it the go-ahead. Senate inquiries used to sometimes change governments' minds. Now they are merely lip-service.
But back to water for a minute.
Here's what the State of the Environment (SoE) Report, released this week, has to say in its key findings about inland waters (pp. 6 & 7).
Favourable news
Some appropriate government responses to management of water resources have been adopted, but implementation is patchy, and the controls may not be sufficient.
The use of biological assessment of river health has developed to the stage where national assessments of river health can be achieved.
That's it for favourable news (clutching at straws I would have thought!)
Here's the Unfavourable News.
Increasing pressures to extract surface and groundwater for human use are leading to the continuing deterioration of the health of water bodies.
Surface water quality has deteriorated further in many areas because of increasing salinity.
Difficulties of managing water resources across state borders continues to hamper effective management.
The complexities of the linkages between inland waters and their catchments are often beyond the capacity of our management systems.
As more controls are placed on the use of surface waters, more groundwater is used. The overuse of surface and groundwater resources affects aquatic ecosystems. About 26% of Australia's surface water management areas are close to, or have exceeded, sustainable extraction limits.
Water use has increased from 1985 to 1996/7 by 65% and water is overused in some regions.
Water extracted for irrigation has increased by 76% from 1985 to 1996/7.
The increase in salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin and other areas is causing water quality decline and land degradation. River water in several catchments is predicted to have salinity levels that will exceed drinking water guidelines in the next 20 years.
Although it is difficult to determine, the frequency, size and persistence of harmful algal blooms in inland waters seems to have increased over the past 50 years. Algal blooms in dams cost farmers more than $30 million per year, and in rivers, storage and irrigation channels about $15 million per year.
And there's also some Uncertain news.
It is difficult to assess the state of inland waters nationally, because of poor data availability and patchy water quality and stream flow data in some jurisdictions.
The report later goes on to say (p. 12) that the Prime Minister's Science and Engineering Innovation Council (1998, p. 11) noted that:
There are clear market failures in that the costs of degradation to downstream users and to the environment, where known, are not borne by those benefiting from the upstream exploitation of the landscape. In many cases the costs will be borne by future generations. Rational (shouldn't that be irrational?) market behaviour at the enterprise level will cause (and has caused) serious and irreversible offsite impacts to biodiversity, rural infrastructure and downstream water users, as well as causing unnecessary hardship to landholders.
The cumulative effects of many small decisions (p. 15)
The cumulative effects of innumerable small developments can severely affect our natural and cultural resources especially as many decisions on land use, water use and lifestyle, in the past as well as at present, have been made independently of any consideration of broader regional or environmental issues.
Environmental management (pp. 16 & 17)
Environmental management in Australia is primarily the responsibility of states and territories with local government carrying out many environmental management responsibilities. The Commonwealth has limited responsibilities.… Planning and management of the environment is often highly uncoordinated between the Commonwealth, the states and territories and local government.
There are five specific difficulties confronting the institutions involved in environmental management. They are:
Varying regulatory arrangements applied to different land uses in adjacent areas making it difficult to achieve conservation on a landscape scale
Responsibilities that are fragmented within and between the levels of government and various agencies
Differing philosophies and approaches between non-Indigenous and Indigenous environmental managers
Fewer resources to ensure compliance with governmental legislation, policy and regulation
Limited co-operation between public and private sectors in long-term environmental management.
And on irrigation, the Report states:
(p. 60) Irrigation now accounts for 75% of water used in Australia. The largest increase in water use was for irrigation in NSW and Queensland where the area of irrigated land has doubled. In 1997, 1.472 million hectares of land was irrigated in the Murray-Darling Basin, 71% of the total area irrigated in Australia.
We are all familiar with the oft-quoted Section 100 of our outdated constitution, a document which many recognise to be an evolving document, while others believe it should remain untouched, a relic of the good old days of federation when we at last became a nation.
But what we seem to forget when applying that Section, all about rights but of course ignoring responsibilities:
Nor abridge
right to use water.
100. The Commonwealth shall not, by
any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of
the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for
conservation or irrigation.
- is that important little word "reasonable". I do not believe that it is possible to claim that states have made reasonable use of the waters of rivers, and the SoE Report supports this view:
(p. 57) (A) significant challenge in water management comes from our system of federalism where states and territories largely have the responsibility for water and catchment management. Each state and territory has different approaches to management, to defining environmental needs, and on deciding what is the acceptable health of an aquatic system. This is further complicated when a river, wetland or groundwater resource crosses state and territory boundaries. Cross border and resource management authorities are striving to achieve more integrated processes and outcomes in the management of their respective inland waters and catchments. However, for some issues state or territory interests have overridden what is environmentally sustainable for the whole catchment.
Responsibility has never come into it. It has all been about rights. Individually states may have felt that their use of the rivers in the Murray -Darling system was reasonable, but they didn't look at the rights of the other users.
With three spheres of government, we watch the states do battle for federal funding, vying for more money. It is all about competition, not co-operation, and as a result of this we have seen the Murray-Darling system collapse as four states claim rights but speak nothing of responsibilities. This instance provides us with one of the most persuasive arguments for getting rid of state governments altogether, and which no doubt, was one of the reasons this topic was chosen for today's forum. I have a list here of no less than 20 pieces of Federal, NSW, ACT, Victorian, Queensland and South Australian legislation relating to the Murray-Darling alone.
Federal
Incorporates the renegotiated agreement with NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia; deals with measures to reduce and avoid pollution of the rivers and other waterways in the Murray-Darling Rivers catchment area. Establishes the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.
Dartmouth Reservoir
(Financial Agreement) Act 1970
Implements Commonwealth-States agreement
over Dartmouth Reservoir
Australian Capital Territory
Lower Molongo River Corridor: Management Plan 2001 (made under the Land (Planning and Environment) Act 1991 (A.C.T.))
Deals with management of an upper catchment area of the Murray-Darling River system
New South Wales
Murray-Darling Basin Act 1992
Implements Agreement with Commonwealth, NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia
Border Railways
Act 1922
Co-operation with Victoria over bridges
Dartmouth Reservoir (Financial Agreement) Act 1970
Implements Commonwealth-States agreement over Dartmouth Reservoir
River Murray (Diversion) Act 1934
Permits diversion near Howlong
Wentworth Irrigation
Act 1890
Implements irrigation scheme at Wentworth
River Murray Traffic
Regulation 2000 (made under the Murray-Darling
Basin Act 1992)
Deals with control of vessels at locks on the River
New South Wales-Queensland Borders Rivers Act 1946
Deals with management of rivers flowing
into the River Darling
Queensland
Murray-Darling Basin
Act 1996
Implements Agreement with Commonwealth,
NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia
Fisheries (Freshwater) Management
Plan 1999
(made under the Fisheries Act 1994)
Deals with fisheries aspects of the Murray-Darling Drainage system
New South Wales-Queensland
Borders Rivers Act 1946
Deals with management of rivers flowing
into the River Darling
South Australia
Murray-Darling Basin Act 1993
Implements Agreement with Commonwealth,
NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia
http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/sasact/0/456/top.htm (old link) River Murray Waters (Dartmouth Reservoir) Act 1971
Implements Commonwealth-States agreement
over Dartmouth Reservoir
http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/sasact/0/455/top.htm (old link) River Murray Waters Agreement Supplemental Agreement Act
1963
Implements Menindee Lakes Storage
Agreement between Commonwealth NSW Victoria and SA.
Victoria [note - many of these links no longer work ]
Murray-Darling Basin Act 1993
Implements Agreement with Commonwealth,
NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia
Marine Safety Legislation (Lakes Hume and Mulwala) Act 2001
Deals with marine safety legislation of
Victoria and New South Wales in Lake Hume and Lake Mulwala on the Murray River
border
River Murray Waters Act 1915 (no. 2)
Provides for the 1914 Commonwealth-State agreement to have been ratified by the
Commonwealth government. Probably redundant.
River Murray Waters Act 1923
Varies Commonwealth-State agreement of 1914. Note: the Commonwealth and other
States appear to have repealed their reciprocal legislation from this period.
Probably redundant.
As mentioned, we all have the right to clean water. But how will we achieve this right if no-one takes responsibility for ensuring that it is delivered? The right to clean water means little if governments and individuals don't take on the responsibility to ensure that we all have access to it.
You may have seen SBS' new series Water: The Drop of Life, which began last Sunday. It provided some interesting figures. In some countries, water use is 4 litres per person per day. In others, it is 425 litres per person per day. There are countries like Spain and Namibia who have realised, out of necessity and water shortages brought about by low rainfall and droughts, that water is a precious resource. And they are doing something about it - in Namibia, where rainfall is 250 mm per year and water use is 5 litres per person per day, they make sewage into potable water, and run comprehensive education campaigns about the value of conserving it. In Phoenix, Arizona, where rainfall is 175 mm per year, one family shown uses 3 000 litres of water per day. Half the water used in Phoenix goes on landscaping, and wealth allows the transportation of water to Phoenix from the faraway Colorado River. 25 million people, including people in Mexico, drink Colorado River water each day, and while people in California and Arizona see daily water as an unlimited resource, people downstream in Mexico are deprived of adequate water for basic needs.
The Greens policies for constitutional reform include a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. Perhaps a global Bill of Rights and Responsibilities would be appropriate, given the above instances. There needs to be equity of distribution, and situations where communities lose their water supply altogether because it is needed for a golf course, as has happened in Indonesia, Thailand and other parts of Asia, ought to be the concern and responsibility of the global community.
How might this issue be couched in a new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for Australia? An excerpt from The Greens policy on this is as follows.
Under the heading
Right and responsibility to environmental protection and conservation
41. (1) Everyone has the collective and individual right to an environment that is protected from excessive, undue or unreasonable human interference and is conserved by the Government for its own intrinsic value.
(2) Everyone has the collective and individual responsibility to protect the air, water and soil of the Earth for the sake of present inhabitants and future generations.
And under the heading
Right and responsibility to ecologically sustainable development
42. (1) Everyone has the collective and individual right to object to development that is not ecologically sustainable and to expect that the Government will accept and act on a reasonable objection.
(2) Everyone has the collective and individual responsibility to promote ecologically sustainable development to assure dignity, freedom, security and justice for all people.
As well as a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, we need national legislation for ecological health. Such legislation would involve a wholistic approach to the problem, bearing little resemblance to the present approach, or to the present system of government in this country, because the focus needs to be on problem-solving, not bureaucracy-building.
Without the state boundaries, and with a national legislative framework to ensure the protection of the environment, AND with the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to back it up, I believe that we could make sure that we don't make the same mistakes again, mistakes that we are still making incidentally, because we don't learn by them, we don't heed the warnings of experts, we just keep chopping and damming and spraying as if our lives didn't depend on it.
And the potential for mistakes doesn't end here. One of the new threats is the introduction of Genetically Engineered organisms into our environment. These are mentioned briefly on p. 80 of the SoE Report, but much more needs to be said.
Herbicide-tolerant GE crops are proposed that could transfer
pollen or shed seed-creating superweeds.
Weed management already costs the nation $3.5 billion per year.
The health and environmental risks
of GE are largely unknown, so it stands to reason, one would have thought, that
governments would want adopt the precautionary principle in relation to this
technology. But instead, gene trials
are happening as we speak, and under section 21 of the Gene Technology
Act, states are free to decide whether they wish to
declare part or all of their jurisdictions GE-free or GE zones.
But GEOs know no boundaries, and just because SA, for example, may decide to stay GE-free, pollen from GE plants will travel across borders.
Biotechnology is a very pertinent
example of why overarching national legislation to ensure ecological health is
important - the GT Act is national but the states are also enacting the
law as it isn't clear that the Federal Government has sufficient constitutional
power to regulate organisations such as State Departments of Agriculture.
With such national legislation, founded upon the precautionary principle, it would be possible to protect this country from the potential dangers of GE until we know more about what they might be. Let us hope that it is not already too late.
But while it is important not to ignore the signs of imminent disaster, it is not enough just to talk about them and get depressed. We need to come up with some positive solutions.
So what might a new system of governance for this country look like? I don't think it is appropriate to come up with a definitive model - that was what happened at the Constitutional Convention and at the Referendum, and - surprise, surprise - they both failed. What we need is a process for ongoing constitutional reform - to slowly but surely over the next few years take ideas out into the community, ask for more, and discuss them, so whatever system we end up with, and I hope it will eventually be an Australian Republic, it is truly for the people, of the people and by the people.
Many of us here today would agree that we have too much government. But others would say that more government should mean more democracy. I don't think we can say that this actually applies in the case of the system we have here in this country at the moment. Perhaps if what we had were more balanced, with less weight in the direction of the larger urban areas and more of it redistributed to the regional areas, we could perhaps argue that there was more democracy. But we'd also have to make sure that the power of some state governments to override local decision-making and enforce development on a region even if they didn't want it was removed to truly be able to say that we had more democracy.
Wouldn't it be easier to just get rid of state governments altogether? That is certainly an option, but we would need to come up, collectively, with something to replace it that was efficient and effective. Just getting rid of that one sphere wouldn't be enough. There are many services which state governments provide which would still need to be provided, but there is no reason that this couldn't be done regionally. We could retain and strengthen local government, and of course recognise it in our new constitution. And to achieve wide support for doing this, we would need to ensure that vested interests were no longer able to dominate Council Chambers across the country. Unfortunately, a large section of the community believes that local government is corrupt and ought to be dispensed with.
And while we're on the subject of vested interests, we need to change the present arrangements relating to campaign donations, so that corporations are not able to buy the ear, and the voice, of government. If corporations want to donate for election campaigns, they can put it all into a big pool to contribute to democracy in general. I have a feeling that such a pool wouldn't be very deep.
To achieve true democracy, we need fixed terms, so governments can't manipulate the system by calling elections when they look best in the polls, or after introducing some beneficent and therefore popular legislation.
To achieve true democracy, we need to have Proportional Representation (PR), so that the broad-ranging views that exist in our community can be expressed and taken into account in decision-making.
And so that these voices are properly heard, we need to make decisions by consensus. PR almost demands consensus, because the way politics are at the moment, the old parties would dominate (until people realised that there are viable alternatives) and majority voting would ensure the same result as it does at the moment.
So what is this mysterious thing called consensus?
In brief, it's about achieving the best outcome based on the views of all those involved. It's about thoroughly discussing the issues so that those views can be heard. It relies on people retaining an open mind while they listen to those points of view that they hadn't considered or thought they didn't agree with. It's about a skilled facilitator maintaining safe meeting procedure while all this is happening, and keeping track of the threads of the discussion and drawing them together when it looks like a conclusion can be reached. Safe meeting procedure, by the way, involves things like good body language, no interruptions while people are speaking, respect for diversity of views, focusing on issues not attacking personalities, having mobile phones switched off, sitting in a circle, so everyone can see and be seen, no side conversations, etc. I have a rather large paper explaining consensus in detail, which can be distributed electronically to those who are interested.
And to achieve true democracy, we need the already mentioned the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which would cover civil and political, economic and social and community and cultural rights and responsibilities, and which we would need to ensure that the government of the day was not able to erode environmental protection, amongst other things.
So how do we meld all this together?
One of the problems with the present structure is that there seems to be no coordination, because each sphere operates with little reference to the others, apart from legislative requirements.
So what about a system based on electorates similar to the Federal electorates we have today, but which were Multi-Member Electorates? That would be the PR aspect taken care of. The members of those electorates would be the members of the National government, and within each of those electorates would sit smaller local government areas like the ones we have already whose representatives were also elected using PR. They would meet to discuss local government issues as they do now, but instead of operating independently from each other, the members of each electorate would meet with representatives of each of the local council areas in between their own local and national meetings.
Another option might be for the national government to be comprised of representatives from local government - each Council would elect its member, by consensus, who would then be one of the members of the larger electorate. And National meetings would take place around the country, to bring decision-making close to the people and to encourage, amongst other things, more people to consider standing for election.
Needless to say, whatever system we ended up with, proper remuneration would need to be available to members of both the national and local governments.
Back to this water. It is not just any water. It is very special water, from my property north-east of Braidwood. I take it wherever I go. I even took it to Japan for the Kyoto Climate Convention in 1997, where I watched the fossil fuel industry make puppets of governments around the world, including our own.
Much of the land in the Braidwood area has been bought by Sydney Water for the proposed Welcome Reef Dam. I believe it is immoral for a city 300 km away to be thinking it needs to dam a largely wild river to allow that growing city to waste even more of this resource than it already does. I have a homemade, earth house 100 metres up the hill from a creek which flows into the Mongarlowe River which in turn flows into the Shoalhaven River - the one marked out for damming. I believe it is my responsibility to protect that waterway, and the catchment areas. I am building a composting toilet which uses no water for flushing. I am planning a grey water system which will turn kitchen and laundry water into something reusable. I have no stock, but if I did, I would keep it fenced out of creek areas. That would be my responsibility, to ensure riparian health. But not for profligate water users in Sydney (although the State of the Environment Report does assure us that domestic water consumption is on the decline). I am ensuring the health of my immediate environment for the local ecology and the downstream water users, including all the wild animals and plants that also depend on it.
Because regardless of our political persuasions, and there are many here today, there is one thing that binds us together and that is our need for water. The other thing, I hope, is a recognition for the need to change, and a commitment to bring that change about.
Cheers.
References
Australian Constitution
Australian State of the Environment Committee, Australian State of the Environment 2001, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood 2001
Water: The Drop of Life, SBS, broadcast 17.03.02
Greens policies, available on the web; go to www.greens.org.au and follow the link to policies. If you cannot find the appendix which contains the draft Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, please email me cath@cyberone.com.au
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