THE MURRAY-DARLING BEYOND FEDERATION:

WATER CRISIS AND THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE

Speech delivered by:

Vicki Dunne MLA
Shadow Minister for Environment

ACT Legislative Assembly

To:

The Shed a Tier Congress
Parliament House Canberra

Friday 22 March 2002

Embargoed until 1.30pm, Friday 22 March 2002

Check against delivery.

Australia - the land, its climate and creatures and plants - is the only thing we all, uniquely, share in common. It is at once our inheritance, our sustenance, and the only force ubiquitous and powerful enough to craft a truly Australian people. It ought to - and one day will - define us as a people like no other.

So said Tim Flannery in his 2002 Australia Day Address, and I submit that that landscape, part of what makes us unique, is under threat in the Murray-Darling Basin.  Today I would like to talk about how the landscape of the Murray-Darling is changing for the worse and how as Australians we need to act decisively, boldly to reverse the decline.

The Murray-Darling Basin covers one seventh of the continent of Australia over New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory. 

The Basin supports:

one quarter of the cattle herd,

half of the sheep flock,

half of crop land and

almost three-quarters of the irrigated land in Australia.

Sixteen cities including Adelaide and Canberra as well as numerous other urban centres rely on the rivers of the Basin for their water supply.

It, along with the Great Artesian Basin, represents life itself for this continent and all who live here.

Yet these precious and priceless assets entrusted to our care – truly the heartland and economic powerhouse of rural Australia - are in jeopardy because of our collective inaction.

The Murray-Darling Basin is being transformed by salinity and low flows from an oasis to a wasteland.  Within our own lifetimes we are seeing how human activity can impact on a highly productive but nevertheless fragile environment.  At the moment we are at risk of losing this forever if we don’t act.

We know now how pressing the issues are: what we lack is the appropriate means to go on from the realisation.

There is little doubt that our constitutional arrangements have thus far failed us in terms of water policy. Even worse, they have been a discernible impediment to developing a cohesive and holistic approach to water resource management.

Even at Federation water was a sticking point because the waters of the Murray, all of which lie in New South Wales, had been used from the 1870s for irrigation in Victoria.

In the first decade of Federation we had the Murray River water agreement.  There have been various iterations and today we have the Murray–Darling Basin Commission, known as the Initiative. 

In terms of managing the Great Artesian Basin, progress has been glacial. Concern over diminishing flows and pressure has been around for a hundred years and Queensland enacted legislation for the Basin’s management as early as 1910 and New South Wales did the same in 1912.  In 1939 a report was commissioned from the Artesian Waters Investigations Committee.

The report was completed in 1945, but it was not until 1954 that the report finally found its way to each State.   It seems that no one ever wants to face the fact that we have been running down our most precious resource for over a century now.

The realisation began to dawn in the 1980s that an important part of the solution lay in significant policy and institutional change, and the COAG Water reform framework followed with an agreement amongst jurisdictions – no mean feat in itself – in February 1994. What marked the agreement as a radical departure was its explicit linkage of economic and environmental objectives.

In many ways these ventures have been the triumph of hope over experience. Just this week at the launch of the Australian State of the Environment the mood was grim but one of the main messages was that “institutional arrangements are often a barrier to effective environment and heritage management”.

While we should not underestimate the great work done by the staff and committees that make up the Initiative, it is hopelessly mired in interstate politics and rivalries that make effective decision-making almost impossible.  The Commission writes its own dire warning but still does not act effectively.

The principal impediment to decision making in the Initiative is the requirement for unanimity.  Each member has a Jagellonian veto which means that only the a bias towards the status quo is acceptable.

The practical effect of all these agreements has been the continued construction of dams, locks and weirs on the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee.  In 1939 there were just 10 dams with a capacity of 100 gigalitres or more, but by 1994, this had increased to 90 – although by that time we were concerned about severely curtailed environmental flows.

Environmental flows have only recently come to our notice as a measure of the health of our river systems, and discussion of desirable levels makes for hot political debate.  Any suggestions of taking back some of the waters to restore environmental flows is met with cries of the economic consequences. 

In the ACT, it has been the policy of successive governments to leave 90% of environmental flows for the rivers.  By contrast, it is estimated that something less than 20% of the water in the Murray-Darling system actually reaches the sea at Lake Alexandrina. At the same time it is estimated that we need to restore 40% of the environmental flows before we begin to have an impact on the health of the river system. That message is not well received by the thirsty farmers along the courses of our mighty rivers. There seems to be a mentality out there that we should keep on farming as we are currently farming until the salt breaks through and until there is nothing left to farm. 

Based on this fact alone, we have a long way to go to fix the Murray-Darling river systems.

One expert, renowned water engineer, Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee, has gone so far as to say there has been “over a century of serious error” in regard to the management of that remarkable resource, the Great Artesian Basin of Australia. He put it fairly bluntly when he said there has been “an incredible and reckless waste of water over the past 120 years.”

Even the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (AFFA) is damning in its bleak assessment:

“Inefficient and inappropriate water use has created problems of national significance: rising water tables, increased salinity of groundwater and soil, decreasing quality of surface water, increasing incidence of algal blooms and degradation of coastal waters.”

This is not a scare-mongering doomsday scenario for some indeterminate future: it accurately describes the situation as it is today.

The Murray-Darling Basin Commission is just as chilling:

“At the present rates at which the groundwater levels are rising, most of the irrigation areas in the southern section of the Basin will have water tables within two metres of the surface by the year 2020. Where the sub-soils contain large volumes of salt, salinated water begins to poison vegetation when water tables rise to within two metres from the surface. In any parts of the Basin this has already happened.”

A sense of urgency pervades all the scientific literature despite carefully chosen words and judiciously neutral language.

For example, the Commission’s Dryland Technical Report Number One of 1997 observed matter-of-factly that within the Murray-Darling Drainage Division at least two-thousand square kilometres of land was now grossly affected by dryland salination with an estimated 10,000 square kilometres at risk of salination by 2010.  

Then there is the Victorian Auditor-General’s report last year into salinity:

“Once salinity severely pollutes the land and waterways, its removal may become financially prohibitive, leading to a major environmental problem for all future generations.”

Quite clearly, we have failed – notably and abysmally – to develop anything resembling a national water policy, and it is a matter for me of deep regret that only now are we beginning to talk about it.

Quite clearly we need to take radical action to save our agricultural industries.

I come to this debate as a passionate lay person, but also as a newly elected politician with a sense that I have a responsibility to contribute to national debate on issues that affect all Australians.

Canberrans, as residents of Australia’s largest inland city and the largest city in the Murray-Darling Basin, have a great responsibility placed on their shoulders.  We must be careful custodians of our water, but more than that, we must be prepared to lead the way in innovative water policy.

John Howard signalled water policy as a priority in the election campaign last year, John Anderson has embraced it, and the idea has been given momentum with the likes of Dick Pratt and Jeff Kennett weighing in.

But I fear that despite a wealth of good intentions the idea – whose time most assuredly has arrived – will become mired in the politics of water – politics with big players, entrenched vested interests and an increasingly bemused public. Nothing is changing because, for many, the solutions are still unthinkable.

The degradation of the Murray Darling Basin and the depletion of ancient water of the Great Artesian Basin cannot go on unchecked.

Let me be quite frank about water in general and the Murray-Darling Basin in particular: we are in crisis.  We have to make some very hard political decisions, decisions that will be immeasurably unpopular in some influential quarters.

Let me give you an example.  The Victorian Mallee was cleared to allow for cropping early last century.  We all know that it has been in many ways an environmental disaster but how would you react if I told you that if we do nothing in the Mallee that in 20 to 30 years it will be knee deep in salt water?  My response is that if we don’t want to turn large slabs of north western Victoria into a big prawn farm it would be a good idea to stop growing grain and livestock on at least some of it.  In fact we should be radically changing management practices to address the rising water table: reserves, agroforestry, lucerne to name a few.

We may need a Mallee rural adjustment scheme but it will be worth it in the long run.  The alternative is lost production, lost experts, lost land.

What can ordinary Australians do to encourage smarter practices and take pressure of the Murray-Darling Basin?

Coming from the Australian Capital Territory, I find we are in a unique position to exert leadership in this debate: we are not beholden to a single vested interest in the complex political miasma surrounding this increasingly scarce but vital resource. We can say things that need to be said, that perhaps are difficult to say directly in other places.

What I’m about to propose was a suggestion first made to me about four years ago by my, then, 16 year old daughter.  She had just finished the obligatory Year 10 geography assignment on salinity and we were doing the family shopping when she said to me that we could not continue to buy Australian rice.

She stopped me in my tracks.  What she was proposing was, on the surface, fundamentally un-Australian.  But I thought about it and came to the conclusion she was right.

A vast and dry continent like Australia has no business cultivating such a thirsty crop as rice – a crop of the monsoon wetlands, not the thin and ancient soils of the arid plains of New South Wales.

Let me illustrate just how thirsty rice is as a crop.

The water needed to produce one dollar’s worth of rice in the husk is seven thousand four hundred and fifty nine litres.

Let me repeat that figure: one dollar’s worth of rice takes 7459 litres to produce.

By comparison, another thirsty crop, cotton, requires just 1600 litres, wine 503 litres and fruit and vegetables 103.

Or to express it another way.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, in its Water Account for Australia, tells us that rice is the most water intensive industry, with an irrigated gross value of just $189 per megalitre of water used. By comparison, irrigated pastures, other grains and livestock returned an average value of $289 per megalitre, irrigated sugar came in at $418 and irrigated cotton at $612 – none of which are entirely appropriate either for Australia.

And the same again in layman’s terms: every hectare of rice produced requires the equivalent of 11 Olympic swimming pools of water from the stressed Murray-Darling System. And we have more than 100,000 hectares under cultivation.

A lot of land, a lot of rice and a hell of a lot of water.

If any crop fits the AFFA description of “inefficient and inappropriate water use” it most certainly is rice – economically as well as ecologically.

Now, no matter how efficient the Australian rice industry is, the question of the resources it consumes has to be addressed.

Is this sustainable?

Is this a wise and judicious use of water?

Is this an appropriate land management practice?

I suggest the answer is no.

We need to send a message that we can no longer be profligate with our land and water.

It pains me to advocate that we give up on Australian produce, but  I know that it would benefit both the Third World now and Australia in the future.

I’m well aware that rice is worth some $300 million a year to the Australian economy and that 57% of it is exported.

I’m well aware that yields have increased from 5 to 7 tonnes per hectare in the early 1970s to more than 9 tonnes in 1992, the highest in the world. 

But I’m also well aware that the industry is founded on a false premise of an inexhaustible supply of cheap, abundant water.

I’m well aware of what has happened to the land, most of it in the Riverina. There are very real concerns, even in the rice industry itself, about salination of shallow groundwater due to rising water tables. Other concerns about the environmental effects of this highly intensive land use are the volume of drainage water and the chemical residues it contains, and the breeding of mosquitoes in irrigated ricelands.

So the big political question is this: how do we take Australian farmers out of their paddies and still guarantee them a future?  

I don’t want this to be taken as simply bashing rice farmers. I am not blaming them, they are victims, locked into an industry that is not sustainable and has no future.

Their plight needs to be looked at sympathetically. 

This is where governments come in.  As Professor Bruce Thom said on Tuesday at the launch of the State of the Environment Report: “government intervention, particularly regulation, can be effective in protecting and managing Australia's environment and heritage.”  So in the ricegrowing areas of the MIA, as in the Mallee, governments must step in to fund the transition from unsustainable farming to sustainable farming.

I’m not talking about tinkering at the edges but massive, structural adjustment.  It is one of many land management problems that we need to address as a matter of urgency.

This generation of Australians – and its leaders in particular – will be defined to a very large extent by the way in which they – we – address or fail to address this issue of truly immense proportions.