 Club member & Guest Speaker Clarke Ballard with a sample of the stuff that is on everyone’s lips
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The Murray-Darling Basin
On Dec 2nd, our own member, Clarke Ballard gave us a quick tour around the Murray-Darling Basin, covering basic geography, management arrangements, the effect of drought on urban supplies, irrigators and the environment, and the controversial north-south pipeline to Melbourne.
It was a very thought provoking address from a man who knows the subject intimately.
The Basin can be divided into two segments. The “lower connected” Basin covering the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Goulburn sub-basins is heavily regulated by large storages, flows all the time, and is connected to the extent that water can be actively traded around it subject to some rules based on hydrologic reality.
Further north, the Darling upstream of Menindee Lakes, and its tributaries in Queensland and northern NSW, are poorly connected and water only reaches the lower connected Basin as intermittent flood flows.
Water resources are a State responsibility under the Constitution so agreements are necessary between States to manage multi-State rivers. Such an agreement has existed on the Murray since 1917; first an agreement only about sharing water in the main stem of the Murray and then, in 1988, a much more comprehensive agreement extending to sustainable management of the whole Basin. As recently as 2002 all seemed well, apart from concern by environmentalists that environmental values were not well enough safeguarded.
However, in the past five years, unprecedented drought has led to a real crisis and the (possible) need for a re-think of management principles. The new principles seem to be that, by Government direction, the needs of cities and towns come first, irrigation comes second and the environment comes last.
That contrasts with the previous philosophy that there will always be enough water for water markets to work, and water trade will sort out the problems without the need for governments to intervene.
Was it really necessary to discard the older “trade will sort it out” principle?
The “takeover” by the federal government of some State responsibilities has only been made possible by the States ceding or delegating some of their constitutional responsibilities to Canberra. That has led to a more complex management arrangement with the federal Minister for Water nominally having final responsibility. However that is something of an illusion, because any State can withdraw its delegation if it feels the need.
One strong message is that climate change is real, whether it is being caused by human actions, natural events or both. The actual events of the past decade, and particularly the past three years, present a gloomier picture than the extensive modelling work carried out by CSIRO over the past two years. It is not possible to know at present which is the better indicator of the future
Lessons from that past three years of drought are:
· Supply to cities and towns cannot be guaranteed under worst case scenarios;
· Irrigators have been in deep trouble for two to five years, but water trade between them is effective in minimising economic losses;
· In contrast the environment, particularly on the lower Murray, has been in deep trouble for a decade, and appears to be getting less consideration rather than more.
Melbourne’s controversial north-south pipeline came in for criticism because most of the “savings” claimed to justify the water to be pumped to Melbourne are not “real” savings but “paper” savings – which in reality are just transfers of water from one user to another.
It was suggested that the north-south pipeline fails all four elements of the Rotary four way test. While it may be fair to irrigators, who at least are getting money spent on their distribution systems to compensate for “paper” savings transferred away from them, the environment is (yet again) a loser.
