We cannot marry coal seam gas extraction with the health of the MDB. These are two different quite separate issues! Moreover, many of the recent changes in the basin are a consequence of years of enduring drought, leaving no water for the environment or irrigators.
As an aside, two thirds of farmers along the river system are dry-land farmers, who can hardly be blamed for the sad state of the river, with carp infestations and the like.
We are confronting inevitable climate change and a much warmer wetter future, where the median average rainfall could be higher! However, it is likely to fall far more furiously; from a greater height and recreate the 14 metre wall of water that took so many lives in the lockyer, many times over!
Anything decided on the basis of an Ideological imperative rather than very thoroughly researched science is likely to be disastrous.
Green advocates seem to ignore calls for limiting evaporation; only ever likely to get worse in a warmer wetter future; and currently reducing flows by as much as 40%+ per annum. Yes, old style flood irrigation has to go; given, with more modern underground applications. we can produce twice the crop yield for half the water.
We live in a world where food shortages will go from serious to severe; and indeed, lead to conflict and or regional war.
Most of the remaining buy back money, should be rerouted into eliminating flood irrigation; and, re-engineering works; designed to stop/prevent both evaporation and leakage, both of which could consume up to three times the water of a sealed system. And that's happening up and down the rivers
We will need to keep growing food or something, which like algae/bio-fuel production; just borrows the water temporarily and then returns cleaned up, back to the system. People have to live!
Simply and almost mindlessly buying back water won't fix the problems, nor satisfy either farmers or all or nothing rigidly recalcitrant green groups?

Rhrosty,

Thank you for proposing concrete methodology for implementing a balanced manageable plan - utilising water more efficiently by installing underground trickle-feed for agriculture, in place of flood irrigation or overhead sprays. Using the buy-back to install such systems has to be the way to go - with less water to achieve the same or even greater food production - a win-win all round. This should of course also include reimbursing those who have already installed such systems. And the time to act is now, while water levels are high.

I would also suggest building more dams in strategic locations, with fish ladders, etc, as well as your suggested deepening of the bed where strategic so as to reduce evaporation.

Someone made a valid comment, that a consistent controlled flow is not nature's way, and would not be optimal for the environment or the ecology - as periodic flooding is essential for the natural breeding cycle of the Murray Cod, for example. This probably also applies to the breeding needs of various water fowl and trees/plants. So, I think some enhanced suitably situated storage (dams) could be utilised to provide such conditions optimally - in concert with nature in periods of intensive rainfall. The science will have to rise to the mark in this regard.

Without the necessary infrastructure, it may be that in times of severe extended drought everyone will have to take a hit - farmers and environment - so that downstream populations will have an adequate water supply. So, the sooner the necessary actions are taken the better for all concerned.

I am not yet sold on coal seam gas extraction (fracking) and releasing huge volumes of saline groundwater - partly because of the potential toxic pollution of the groundwater, and due to the potential damage to and lowering of the water table, and because of the problem of disposing of the saline water responsibly. Judgement still out. In the meantime I think it would be prudent to hold off on fracking anywhere near prime agricultural areas.

thanks Diane for a compelling analysis of the draft MDB Plan form an historica perpsective. Whilst the historical analogy is very powerful and convincing, it is the critique of adaptive management that I particularly liked. This concept seems to me to have been invoked regularly by governments to justify proceeding in ignorance when precaution should be the rule. The two concepts are distinct policy counterpoints, but precaution in the face of a lack of adequate scientific certainty concerning potential impacts is treated with scorn by most policy-makers – and I doubt rates even a mention in the draft MDB Plan!

History is watching the MDBA.

With regard to CSG, one cannot consider the health of the MDB without factoring in the huge amount of "produced water" the CSG people will release into the surface water systems of the MDB.
Tony Burke has approved some 10,000 wells in Qld alone. All within the upper reaches of the Basin.
That water has to go somewhere.
Where?
And what about the vast amounts of salt which will come up with it?
They are talking now about using that salt in industrial processes.
They have to do something.
Originally, when the CSG industry was small, they simply sprayed the excess on roads, pretending they were doing dust reduction.
That won't work now that people are a wake-up to them.
.
But the Bureaucrats and the people on forums like this must get their heads around the facts of this matter.
You cannot pretend it is not happening.
Denis Wilson

Part One: An emerging narrative?

The comments over the past two days indicate a willingness to engage seriously with serious ideas and to move beyond the representation of responses to the MDB Plan as a ‘tug of war’. Informed discussion of decisions that will shape the lives of all Australians for future generations is welcome. These decisions need to be framed by science and law. Of course the process is ultimately political but it is to the detriment of the Australian nation that science has been politicised. It behooves an Authority wrapped in a cloak of independence and with access to a $10 billion budget of taxpayers’ money to begin with the law and the science concerning the river, to be open and clear, to facilitate civil and informed debate.

It grieves but does not surprise me that so few citizens understand what is being attempted in the Basin Plan. When confronted by book burners, one smells a media stunt and contempt for serious scholarship. Such willful behavior effectively closes down civil debate. If the MDBA is on a journey, I would cast the release of the Guide in October 2010 as prequel. The Guide was flawed. There was work to be done. Rather than defend the science, the MDBA repudiated the document and began again: new models, new members, new rhetoric. It is now a ‘working river’ to be managed in the interests of all. How is this to be achieved? By a balanced plan. In whose interests and according to whose scales will this balance be achieved? Again, initially, I would argue it must be science and law, not competing self interests, some better resourced than others.

‘Everything is connected’ is a basic principle of Ngarrindjeri culture and ‘connectivity’ a key concept of ecology. How interesting then, as I read though the comments of the last two days, to see the interconnection of concerns being raised about our relationship to the river and how this has been made manifest in historical accounts and in current management plans. Continued in Part Two.