Great article thanks. The analogies with Burke and Wills were instructive, particularly Wills ditching most of his scientific gear in the interests of egalitarianism. The lesson has to be: some have more legitimate needs than others, in this case, we can't sacrifice the environmental integrity of the river in the process of dividing up its waters.

I hope the MDBA journey will not be one of failure. Craig Knowles must go back to the peer-reviewed literature and bring the Wentworth Group back on board.

I haven't read the report, but benefited from the account that the writer has given of it. 'Adaptation' has to be the way to go. We know that the MDB experiences periods of drought and flood. We know that there have been extensive droughts around Federation, during the second world war and in the 1990s. There is plenty of water at the moment, and it is likely that for the next few years there will be adequate flows. Managing the river system by taking account of the differences in rainfall, and recognising the much greater human 'claims' on the water, now and in the future, is a tricky job. But adaptation to me seems the key. Maybe it's all there in the report, but from the writer's account, I wonder.

The fantasy of it all reminds me of another journey. It is the journey of a little girl from Kansas following along a yellow brick road. If only she can overcome all the hurdles on the way she might be able to meet the wizard and he can point out the way home. Mr Knowles says he is also on a journey, traveling with his metaphorical companion, the MDBA plan. His companion like the heroine of our story and her intrepid travelling companions have similar failings; not enough heart, not enough courage and not enough brains. Of course, we all know that the promises of a solution offered by the wizard of oz came to nought. The whole trip turned out a bit of a flop. When it came down to it all Dorothy really had to do was to click her heels together and she would find herself back in Kansas. At the end of the day the story was about the journey and not so much about a solution. The wizard, who turn out not to have much magic at all, escapes his critics and the confused onlookers in a hot air balloon. Not sure if MDBA have the magic to create a happy ending from our own story, but if not, maybe we will all have to move to Kansas.

Diane Bell challenges us as a nation to figure out how to take on big projects in order to succeed rather than adopt the Australian penchant for celebrating failure [eg., she mentions the ANZAC campaign]. The implication is the MDBA draft plan is programmed to fail the river system. She weaves the pseudo-scientific endeavour of Burke and Wills's tragic exploration of the inland into her critique, providing the Authority with an apocryphal cautionary tale of failure.

Bell argues that the peer-reviewed science necessary to inform the decisions to be made [already made?] about the MDB is not sufficiently comprehensive. Her entertaining account confirms my gut-feeling from afar in Queensland that this is another "consultative" process that is merely a travelling show set down to a script designed to entertain communities with the notion that they have had real input. It seems more of a sop to the bookburners than a real attempt to inform decision-making with the scientific, social and economic benefits of keeping the Murray-Darling healthy.

Not only is critical research sidelined, but social science also appears to take second place to interest-group politics. Bell draws our attention to the critical failure of the MDBA to apply the scientific method, which is integral to adaptive management, a term appropriated by the Authority to dress up its real decision-making processes.

Science appears subordinated to politics in the Murray-Darling and the managerialism behind the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's "consultative" process. That this is inherent in contemporary environmental and climate politics on both sides of politics is incontrovertible. In Queensland and NSW we see Liberal and Labor governments fudging their responsibility to bring peer-reviewed science to the environmental, economic and social effects of large scale open-cut mining and CSG extraction on water resources, farmland, communities and the health of livestock and people.

Jim McDonald
Greens Candidate
Noosa

Thank you for your article. Adaptive management is difficult here for at least three reasons. Firstly the lack of knowledge of the impacts of environmental flows on ecosystems (see the CSIRO report at the NWC website - http://www.nwc.gov.au/publications/waterlines/improving-environmental-water-planning-and-policy-outcomes-ecological-responses-to-flow-regimes-in-the-murray-darling-basin). Secondly because we are talking about highly resilient systems most recently demonstrated by the water bird surveys undertaken by Richard Kingsford et al (as an aside why was he so 'surprised'?). The last thing resilient systems need is continuity rather than variability. I fear that much of the objective of environmental watering is/will be to maintain relatively constant flows, or at least some minimal flow, to the detriment of many ecosystems. The third issue is that bureaucracies are not well placed to undertake large scale adaptive management when they have to answer to politicians (more a comment about politicians rather than technocrats).

Yes Don, adaptive management is an excellent approach when one is dealing with complex systems and in particular with living systems that have their own rhythm. My concern with the Draft Plan as it stands is that adaptive management remains vague, more an aspirational goal than a well-resourced, strategic, multi-disciplinary approach that would have some hope of achieving the goals of the Water Act. We have examples within the MDB, for instance, the Macquaire Marshes, that could provide sound models but then there is the issue of scale, expertise, monitoring and acting on the feed-back in a flexible and timely manner. The lessons to be learned by not being prepared to consider all options is made plain in the article by Kingsford et al in a Ramsar Wetland in Crisis - www.publish.csiro.au/journals/mfr. A number of us have offered constructive criticism of the concept but are yet to to 'engaged' by the 'engagement team' of the MDBA.