< We need a better water plan. Australian governments are dismantling the irrigation sector and this will cost us dearly in the years to come. >

I find it hard to believe that our utterly antisustainability-oriented government could be kowtowing to the green vote to the extent of greatly changing the allocation of water from irrigation into natural flows.

There is another reason for this sort of change – the glaringly obvious disaster that is the Murray / Darling River system… and the now blatantly obvious huge overallocation of water to irrigation.

So, is our government really dismantling the irrigation sector or just striving to bring it in to a more realistic match with the availability of water, when considering the very long dry periods that we are subjected to and the all the negative consequences that starving the natural systems of water has on us humans?

<< …it takes over 1000 tonnes of water a year to feed an Australian. >>

Something like that.

How many more Australians are there every year? And what effect is this having on our overall water-provision ability?

An absolutely enormous effect!

Julian, I’m not sure about the overall tenet of your article regarding irrigation, but I certainly agree that we CRITICALLY DESPERATELY need a government that is fundamentally sustainability-oriented.

Thought provoking and a matter of concern. I agree with the article's content generally, however, Tasmania is possibly the exception to the rule, in that irrigation is being extended here, despite the amount of available rainfall. I am not sure that the Greens would want water diverted from rural entities and into the cities, nor do I agree with the fact that cotton is listed as a good use of water. Plantation trees and cotton, for fibre, are not a good way to use water and that has happened in the Murray-Darling region. Hemp is a far better way of reaching fibre objectives, with far less water use and no chemicals. Hemp is also an excellent fuel producer and food source that could remove our dependancy of meat. Growing hemp (formally a desert plant) also in arid regions is a good way of making use of land that can't be used for anything else. Overall, water is our most valuable resource and it is being wasted, sold overseas and polluted for avarice. It should be a crime to import any food, at the expense of Australian food producers and I personally scan the shelves and read the labels to find locally-produced food. If the carbon tax is doing its job then carbon miles should rule food imports out, shouldn't it?

We do need a far better water plan and a govt not afraid to use its external powers to see we get it.
Wherever ideology replaces pragmatism in policy settings, we will always get inferior outcomes, be it the privatisation of the water market or the destruction of the family farm in favour of tax avoiding corporations.
Or when foreigner carpet baggers/corp raiders and their massive and growing foreign debt burden, which we Australians service every day in every way; threatens to completely wreck what remains of our economy. All with the apparent fawning compliance of govts? Why, we don't even own Vegemite!
The GST was installed largely because off-shoring corporations, took their tax liabilities with them, all while expecting, nay demanding, all the advantages of taxpayer supplied services and or infrastructure?
And at the other end of the political spectrum, green advocates, who seem to believe we can import everything.
That someone somewhere will ensure that their often over-generous salaries are maintained, or social service will continue, as if by magic; or rather, courtesy of the dawn to dark gut bust of the still productive tax paying minority.
And of course they want to mindlessly dam the dams and put trees, cuddly Koalas; and or, forests ahead of the national interest?
Follow green ideology to its logical conclusion, and well, we could become a cash strapped basically bankrupt Greece, or financially crippled Zimbabwe, or a cashless and starving northern Ethiopia?
Follow the fatuous, sell the family silver and the family farm, conservatives?
And we can all become tenants in our own land, paying well over the odds for everything, and where the shrinking privileged few live behind glass topped walls and or razor wire, in a prison of their own making?
And where the rest reside in crime riddled ghettos, the end result of visionless policies; and or, career pollies and their personal needs or desire for personal power, trumping the national interest or pragmatism?
Continued--- Rhrosty.

A better plan would manage the water, from the mountains down to the sea. Millions of small upland dams would be created, sometimes as mandated land care, by private landholders?
These dams would be so sited, as to quite literally force trillions of tons of water into the upland landscape, where it prevents erosion and forces any salt down under an envelope of fresh; and, from where it can gradually seep back into the system, during the expected extended dry times.
This additional water surety would make modest hydro schemes viable, which in turn would further moderate the feast of famine nature of our water supplies.
Of course we must recycle effluent, which can and ought to support increased agriculture.
Why, we can turn our waste into almost costless energy, then use the reclaimed water to grow mop crops like carbon absorbing algae, with the once again recycled water, fed via underground tapes, to maintain orchards, tree crops and or understory, like coffee or blue berry, or in under-glass high density operations which can reclaim most of the evaporate, as pristine potable water etc/etc.
Moreover we can use windmill pumped around salt sea water to grow crops, utilising ag-pipes wrapped in membrane, and where the moisture pulling power of various plants provides a costless reverse osmosis.
Done under glass, the then evaporate can also be recovered as pristine potable water.
But before that, we need to shift our food production to where we still have water, like the North where rainfall can be measured in metres!
Or to tiny Tassie, which has lots of unused excess water capacity, and an economy struggling, simply for want of exportable commodities!
The Murray/Darling, could be rescued and or massively prospered, as a very productive and wealth creating area! If the production paradigm was converted from food production, to very low water use algae farming, and bio-diesel production.
The govt is holding billions, set aside to rescue the Murray, and virtually all the remaining funds ought to be diverted for the aforementioned proposed purpose!
Rhrosty.

Isn't it ironic, as on the one hand we have our PM saying we are well placed to be a global super provider of food, while on the other her government, and states are taking away the most important ingredient in food production, water.

My beef about water is the amount we townies are forced to waste.

We treat all of our water to A grade drinking standard, then we bath in it, we water our gardens with it, wash our cloths, cars, pets, driveways, but we consume less than 2% of what is treated to this standard.

All because we are not allowed to recycle. What a waste!

We should be drawing 100% recycled water from our taps ( fit to consume if boiled) and buy drinking water.

As for coal seam gas water, every drop, once desalinated, should be channeled to the Murray Darling Basin, at least in the downs area.

John Bradfield had the foresight a hundred years ago but as is normal for every generation some academic do-gooders vehemently oppose any sensible, practical solution. We need to recharge the underground water storage that was. The Bradfield scheme would do this with no environmental damage whatsoever, on the contrary.
With the building of so many suburbs we have increased the run-off i.e. loss of enormous amounts of water. We can reverse this by simply filling the natural underground system by reversing the flow of the run-off either by canals or pumps. No major costs involved at all. Just keep the consulting engineers away & it can be done in a wink.

In neither the post, nor any of the comments, is any mention of the ideas advanced by Peter Andrews, and given extensive publicity by the ABC on Australian Story, and his two books "Back From The Brink" and "Beyond The Brink". Peter's ideas, and those not dissimilar ideas advanced by Permaculture, demonstrate that it is possible to restore natural hydrological systems to what they were before man's activities destroyed them.

Few Australians know that before the white man came, much of the Australian outback was covered by swamps, and casuarinas. Rivers flowed steadily and constantly for most of the time. on 28 April 2012, Jennifer Marohasy wrote at her blog: "And along these same lines I’ve written that if the current water reform process is truly about giving back to the environment, then we should be thinking back to a period before rivers and creeks became constricted by sheets of water running off compacted soils, before swamps were diverted, before river de-snagging and before the blasting of rock bars for paddle steamers.

As historian Bill Gammage notes in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia back in the dreamtime shallow streams and overflows flushed more of Australia, filling billabongs, swamps and holes, and recharging springs and soaks.

That was a time when the health of a landscape was measured less by how much water was in a river, and more by how many kangaroos it could support.

In 1901 James Cotton, a Cobar pioneer, wrote that before the district was stocked with sheep and cattle it was covered with a heavy growth of natural grasses and that the ground was soft, spongy and very absorbent.

Overstocking was a problem throughout the Murray Darling Basin particularly during the late 1800s resulting in significant land and water degradation. Overstocking transformed soils in many districts from soft and spongy to hard clay that, instead of absorbing water, caused the rain to run off in sheets as fast as it fell – to again paraphrase Mr Cotton." To be continued....

Continued. Peter Andrews (and others) argue that to restore the outback to what it once was we need to stop draining swamps, and stop engaging in artificial irrigation activities that drain the landscape. Instead we should be seeking to restore the natural hydrological systems that once existed out there and supported prolific life.

To do this, we must encourage vegetation. Whatever vegetation that will grow. Including what are called "weeds". Weeds are actually nature's way of restoring the landscape to what it should be. Once the weeds have played their role, the landscape develops healthy pastures and trees. Vegetation causes dramatic improvement in the soils, increasing the sponge-like nature of the soils, enhancing their capacity to hold water.

In healthy hydrological systems, rainfall is held in the deep sponge-like soils and vegetation, running off gently and constantly, and in a useful way. This is in contrast to the massive floods that now occur, releasing all of the water downstream in a very short time.

Peter Andrews ideas, and those of Permaculture, have been demonstrated at Gerry Harvey's Hunter Valley property, and also Tony Cootes' property near Bungendore.

The ideas are valuable, and worthy of consideration. They have been assessed by the CSIRO. Strange that all the discussions on the Murray Darling (for example) seem to ignore these proven alternative ideas.

Herbert Stencil,
That is absolutely correct & what it boils down to is that smarter people need to be put in charge. As I said earlier keep the consulting engineers & bureaucrats away & things will be achieved.

Herbert Stencil, Peter Andrews’ ideas are all well and good, up to a point.

But there are a number of problems.

Firstly, his advocacy of the use of any plants that will hold the soil and grow in saline environments is a little unfortunate. He should be restricting the use of such plants to native species. Non-native species utilised in this manner are precisely the sort of hardy plants that could become widespread ecologically damaging weeds.

Secondly, there is only so much that can be done to recover the terribly badly damaged rangeland country and salinated agricultural belt, especially while they remain under cattle grazing, irrigation or dryland intensive agriculture.

Thirdly, the sort of remediation that Andrews wants to see is very long-term and only partial. We’ll never get the landscape nor the hydrological patterns therein back to how they were, nor anything like it.

And fourthly and most significantly, it requires us to pull well back on the magnitude of human usage.

How do we do this without causing a great deal of social disruption and vehement opposition?

How do we do it while we have a very rapidly growing population and hence a rapidly increasing demand for water, food and export income?

Peter Andrews’ / permaculture / sustainability-oriented ideas are definitely the way to go. But we need to be smart and develop a total sustainability program.

And one of the most fundamental points is to strive to make sure that the ongoing secure rate provision of water, one of our most basic and important resources, remains safely well ahead of the demand.

In the current circumstances of seriously stressed water provision, it is simply lunacy to be rapidly expanding our population.

Ah well, as someone who was in the public record advocating Peter Andrews ideas, possibly before he thought of them, I agree with most of what he advocates. I've seen the visible evidence of those plans put into practise, turn run down salinated farmland, to more productive and fertile areas than at any time in the past, and against the express wishes of ponderous, pompous, pedantic petty-frogging ecologists and others, who claim that things, like willow are imported woody weeds. Even though nothing native comes close, in holding and binding loose ground together?
To my knowledge Peter never subscribed to the idea of not draining marshes per se; but rather, to create side by side mounds and channels that allow mechanised farming; and, utilise the water as ultra reliable water supply.
By and large wetlands, whether man-made by pioneers like Peter, or naturally occurring and made into productive farmland by raising the productive areas above the water table, are good ways of working with nature and cleaning water of both pathogens and alluvium!
Plant produced oxygen cleaning up the pathogens, and ponding dealing with suspended matter?
As for the Murray.
I've seen some excellent examples, where covered storage and underground only applications, allow double the food production with just half the water!
We can lose more than half the Murray every year, via evaporation rather than overuse.
We can't un-engineer just about the most engineered waterway in the western world.
But we can and should get the engineering right; by filling in open channels and replacing them with pipes!
We can and should deepen most of the current water storages; or cover them, to reduce the huge evaporation numbers, which are sometimes even higher than the storage capacity!
As is sometimes said, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Lets not drown towns or leave wetlands wet for so long, that we kill them!
Rhrosty.

Look, under glass food production uses just a tiny fraction of open irrigation. [Between 5-10%?]
Closed cycle algae framing in large clear plastic pipes,i.e, uses just 1-2% of the water, of traditional irrigated crops.
Pound for pound, spirilina, a blue green algae, is the most nutritious and complete food on the planet.
And other generally toxic varieties, could contain as much as 60% oil!
Algae also absorb 2.5 times their bodyweight in carbon emission, and under optimised conditions, double that bodyweight and carbon absorbing capacity every 24 hours.
Interestingly, there are around 6,000 alga varieties?
Some of the less/non toxic varieties, can be used to clean up the toxic varieties, which they cannibalise!
Ain't nature wonderful?
Rhrosty.

The Bradfield plan, basically proposed a very long and very large pipe to carry water from the very wet north to the very dry south. It was never ever attempted or considered, except for public money wasters? Like a record spending Premier Bettie? It would literally cost trillions, and there would be no guarantee, that the north would not also be affected by very long dry spells, that might render such expensive infrastructure virtually worthless or useless, just when it was needed the most?
However, and I haven't read anywhere that the following was his plan?
We can and should inject water into various aquifers? Some of our northern surplus could be gravity fed into and top up the Great Artesian basin, which stretches from far northern Q'ld, to northern S.A.
Most of our wasted storm water can first be fed into man made wetlands for cleaning, and then injected into known aquifers, for extended storage or reserve water supplies.
Better and far less expensive than desal plants that cost billions to build and millions to maintain.
We saw some of our inner city houses, crack, crumble and become uninhabitable, during the last long dry spell, simply because the ground they stood on, became extremely cracked and dry.
Ditto many urban roads, which then allowed excess water to enter when the rains returned, creating many potholes, vehicle damage and expensive road repairs in the process!
All that is required to overcome all those problems, is tiny grates set in gutters, about a metre apart, and each feeding storm water run-off, into under nature strip ag pipes.
Whenever the occasional short storms created run-off, this ultra simple solution alone, would prevent drains exceeding their capacity; and, replace most of the moisture lost in the urban environment during extended dry spells, preventing virtually all the problems indicated above.
A stitch in time saves nine!
Rhrosty.

advocacy of the use of any plants that will hold the soil and grow in saline environments...restricting the use of such plants to native species.
Ludwig,
By no doing so you merely slowing down evolution by by a few hundred years if that. This business of keeping everything isolated at huge cost is simply a waste of good money. We can't stop nature. We have distributed enough flora & fauna that we can not change the date for the point of no return. It's called EVOLUTION. As long as there is wind & living things moving ever around you will have introduction of new species i.e. EVOLUTION. To try & stop this is as silly as believing you can make the majority of people think.
To change a couple of rivers towards the interior is not a waste of money. No pipes needed, the water will find it's own way albeit some people may have to accept that they might have to shift to higher ground. They can be compensated by those who benefit. I for one would hold up my hand for some river or lake frontage.

Strongly agree with some of the above, strongly disagree with a bit (eg recycling sewage immediately - long story, dangerous and unnecesssary).

There is a lot of cant in this debate. Here was my effort at clarity!

Fight for the Murray Campaign
c/- Government of South Australia
Adelaide

Dear Sirs

YOUR CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE EASTERN STATES

Are you serious?

The city of Adelaide is not even in the Murray Basin!

If Adelaide chooses to drain the Murray and not let the seas flush out the estuary, well, that is South Australia’s choice. You are free to make that choice.

But please do not give us any sanctimonious humbuggery from the squattocracy of the Adelaide Hills about what the rest of the country owes you.

The ACT uses only some 3% net of its water resources and gives the rest downstream for free, without charge, having stored it for you at our expense, and you have the effrontery to lecture us?

Does the rest of eastern Australia exist only for Adelaide?

I have no animus towards the Province of South Australia, but the fact that the Colony was free-settled does not give it the right to lord it over the other States.

If you want a war over the River Murray and every other river on this side of the Great Divide, be careful what you ask for.

Greed is not good and having an artificial freshwater lake at the mouth of the Murray which loses 2000 Gigalitres of water a year is not something you should be defending when the whole ACT region uses less than 40 Gl net a year for 350,000 people.

Faced with the sort of arrogant hypocrisy embodied in your campaign I am asking our ACT politicians to start charging for the water we send you. Why should we here pay an outrageous $4.66 per kilolitre so you can waste 2000 Gigalitres of water from your artificial lake every year?

Yours faithfully

Terence Dwyer