Whenever a lawyer tells me there is a problem I know they are looking at some slippery money making scam.
Labour in Victoria wasted billions of dollars including for a massive de-sal plant which is going to keep costing us massive amounts of money.
I think the point that escapes everybody is there is plenty of water just in the wrong place some of the time.
Invariably people treat it badly and under value of it. Australia should use its water but be warned all the scientists will say research, they will take no responsibility but keep repeating research, research! They mean money of course.
Leave this problem to the adults Kellie and stick to what you know.

Whether we accept anthropogenic global warming or not, this a problem that the world will have to face. Wars have been fought for land and for oil - in the future they will be fought for control of water.
I do not know what is the most effective way of stopping conflict: the UN is a good talking shop but actions tend to follow words by a decade or two.
The USA has no standing in this discussion considering the way it so overallocated water from the Colorado River that Mexico gets almost none of the flow.
Ignore the patronising last sentence by JBowyer, Kellie. This is an article worthy of a long, considered discussion.

We have built desalination plants in the south of the country whilst billions of gallons of fresh water flows into the sea from our northern rivers.

Pipelines anyone?

Kellie; I think you're being unnecessarily pessimistic.

In the news recently (in the last week on OLO) was a new dutch process that allows salt (almost any) water to be reclaimed as 97% fresh water; and very affordably!

And we here are uniquely placed to turn a negative into a positive, by turning most of the Murray/Darling into a huge algae farm; and just for 1-2% of the water of traditional irrigation.

And to prosper that region as never before! And what better purpose could anyone find for the remaining save the Murray fund. One of the things we grow better than almost anyone else is ALGAE!

I mean we import around 91% of our current oil supplies at 21 billions or thereabouts every year; and if we but did algae farming on a large enough scale, could reroute that money through the Murray/Darling instead!

And there the usual flow on factors could make it do as 140 billions worth of annual economic work before it exhausted!

Algae absorb 2.5 times their own bodyweight in Co2; and under optimized conditions double that bodyweight and absorption/oil production capacity every 24 hrs!

Name just one other oil rich crop that does that; and on that amount of water, most of which is just borrowed and then returned to the environment, cleaned of problematic nutrients.

Some algae are up to 60% oil!

And a couple of types currently being trialed, produce naturally occurring virtually ready to use as is, diesel or jet fuel! And child's play to extract!

If you drive a petrol or diesel powered vehicle; you're driving on algae, given that is and remains the source of most oil deposits around the world!

Weep no more Kellie, better to just stay properly informed!
Rhrosty.

Is Mise; >pipelines anyone?<

Well it's essentially a good idea, if we had several spare trillions to pay for them?

Perhaps we could ask the Chinese for the money?

Why they might even supply the "steel pipes" and build them for us, using our fire sale iron ore; then rent them back for 10-15 billion per? And thinkable, given the current crop of Pollies!?

Alternatively we could adapt your idea and take some water where it rains/falls in metres, and then using just gravity, inject it into any convenient aquifer, (the great artesian basin perhaps) that would transport it southward?

And lets not forget the 50% approx, of north <> south aquifers, that were once too salty to use for any purpose?

But nonetheless, could be so used now as relatively cheaply connected bridges that transport water, North <> South, East <> West?

And only doable due to the recent advances in desalinating water for a fraction of what it once cost; and at 97 recovery rates as fresh water; thanks to the innovative Dutch!

Which also opens up most of our western coastline to formerly impossible development!

Imagine a climate where the sun shines almost all the year round/hardly ever rains, and yet there's enough water for everyone to waste a little, including in decorative fountains/long showers or some such?
And where properly treated effluent could make the desert bloom!

I mean, some of the water that flows down the Murray (waters our riverland crops) may pass through several sets of kidneys before it reaches the sea!
Rhrosty.

Does anyone else think a population of 7,000,000,000 people (and growing) could be as much the problem as climate change?

Perhaps climate change is Mother Nature's way of starting to re-take control of the spread of humans around the globe. Its about time someone starts doing something.

Tim, we have been through all this before. Tim? Tim?. Oh sorry, it's Kelley!. Speak to Tim Kelley.

The water we should be weeping over is the water running into the sea when any person with any sense would of built more dams. With the idiotic Greens influencing so much of politics little hope of any commonsense. Kelly you must stop listening to Tim Flannery. He has been caught out with egg over his face so many times.

“Calls for transformational responses are still lacking. In Baker & MacKenzie's April 2014 submission to the Government's issues paper on Agricultural Competitiveness said that over 50% of those surveyed believed the greatest challenge to Australia's food supply was the availability of water.”

Thanks to dysfunctional environmental activists and gullible politicians, a large volume of Murray-Darling system water is denied to agricultural producers, so that absolute priority is given to maintaining socalled environmental flows so that they reach the sea – correction: so that such flows continuously fill the artificial lake behind the man-made barricades across the Murray right where it meets the sea.

Those barricades should be pulled out so that natural environmental flows are restored in the Murray mouth. Before installation of the barricades, tidal flows used to reach some 70 km up the Murray. Any primary producer directly adversely affected by removal of the barricades should receive structural adjustment assistance.

Methinks Miss Kellie is channeling the need for huge nuclear reactors dotted around the Australian coast to power mega Desalination plants.

Starting with Byron Bay and Kirribilli?

ConservativeHippie is the only person, apart from Kellie T, who makes sense.
TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Solve the problem, stop bandaiding the symptoms.
As for stuffing up the Ecosystem further with hair brained Desalination Plant and Pipeline schemes.
Haven`t we done enough damage and you want to do MORE?

You probably are pretty right plantagenet, although I think the desire to keep her byline in front of the public may have something to do with it. Apparently it matters not if what you say makes sense, provided you get published. I guess aiming for a political career move.

People don't think too deeply when they suggest desalinisation, or pipelines. Pumping long distances works for oil & gas, but the energy cost is so great, that providing water that way could only be considered with a huge increase in power generation. That means lots of coal, or nuclear, nothing else will hack it.

60 years ago I read the book by Ian Idriess on turning the northern Queensland rivers inland to generate a huge food bowl. There after getting water over the tablelands, gravity would supply the energy to move it the rest of the way. It was still ridiculously expensive.

Yes Raycom, remember the idiots rejoicing when a huge percentage of the water from the snowy system allocated to make the Snowy river "great again". They can now sit & watch that water flow uselessly out to sea.

I really an against any move to rob water from one area to supply our now rather useless large cities. If they outgrow their natural resources, including water it is time to tell the hangers on to move to where resources are available. Public housing should not be built in such places, & dole should not be paid.

Time to shut South Australia down, & use our water where it fell. SA has the resources, uranium & the ocean, to supply it's own water. If they chose not to use them, let then go thirsty.

An important topic Kellie. With due respect, studying politics, philosophy and economics evidently did not equip Malcolm Fraser to be the architect of Australia's future water supply system. 'Pipedreams'such as grand schemes to divert water south are older than federation. If we had placed water security, among other things, ahead of narrow and simplistic 'development' earlier in our history, providing for our future water needs might have seemed less daunting. It is no accident that human populations have thrived not too far from reliable water supplies. There have been proposals to ‘grow’ the population of northwestern Australia instead of moving the water, but that’s another story. Good background material in the Australian context: "Watering the Garden State.” Powell, J. M., ISBN 0043600743, and; The Emergence of Bio-regionalism in the Murray-Darling Basin' by the same author.
The technical difficulties of trans-continental pipelines are formidable and the financial, environmental and energy costs might well be prohibitive. Bringing water from the Kimberley to Perth’s would more than double the average household water bill. Desalination would cost less than a quarter of the pipeline scheme.
One comment on your blog suggests ‘a new Dutch desalination process that allows salt water to be reclaimed as 97% fresh water’. Assuming the raw water is from the sea, the salinity of the reclaimed water would be around 1,000 ppm which is much higher than accepted limits for human consumption. Melbourne's water supply salinity averages less than 50 ppm. The cost of desalination is prohibitive for agricultural purposes and 1,000 ppm of dissolved salts is too high for many crops, especially with sprinkler irrigation. The ratio of sodium to other cations must also be considered to protect the physico-chemical integrity and hence, the productivity of soils.
There is much discussion of climate change and its effects on agriculture. Changes in rainfall patterns are likely to result in traditionally productive regions becoming marginal. The transition may be gradual with subtle shifts in seasonal rainfall distribution. Even with the same annual aggregate rainfall, this may cause major disruption to cropping, catchment conditions and ground water.

These sort of articles attract flies, and I could also write the comments for them. They are predictable silly and ill informed.

Tot he actual piece , more work needs to be done to balance environmental, industry use of water, greater use of pipelines and desal should be in the mix. I also think we should be making greater use of off stream dams to store water with decent flushing systems when flooding is threatening. for an Australian context we should be developing the north not piping water south.

Hasbeen I can only imagine you're the idiot son of a cotton farmer.

I am intrigued by the way that this discussion has been limited to Australia when the troubles in Iraq/ Syria/ Palestine/ Israel are exacerbated by a shortage of water. I am also intrigued by the fact that only a few have talked about the biggest problem facing the world : overpopulation with each extra mouth expecting a higher standard of living than before.

What can we do to reduce the Earth's overpopulation? This is the main question. Please focus on that!

B of B,
If we don`t soon Mother Nature will.
Ebola is only the start.
Next comes starvation and droughts on a grand scale plus a few more plagues.
Meanwhile breed on human virus, breed on.............

Brian, the theme of Kellie's post is the need to plan for our "water-insecure" future with reference to Malcolm Fraser and Andrew Forrest. It's not too surprising that comments would tend to be in the Australian context.
Your comment about population is interesting and something I have been concerned about for a very long time. However, the 'population debate' seems to be evolving in a disturbing direction. I'll post a recent paper on this topic separately because it's too long for a comment.

Water may exacerbate existing wars, but it is not the cause of any wars in modern times, and despite decades of predictions to the contrary, it is unlikely to be in the future, as nations are able to negotiate water rights.

As for overpopulation, we will need to look at options for encouraging people to have smaller families, but in most places they already are. What we need to be doing in the short to medium term is approaching the problem from the opposite end: increasing our planet's carrying capacity so that a higher population is less of a problem.

In Australia we need to make better use of the water we have. Environmental flows are very important but they need to be managed better. We should be running pipes from Northern Australia – not to the capital cities (where desalination's a more cost effective option) but to the remote communities of Central Australia. And piping water under Bass Strait is an option that's certainly worth considering.

There should be no fair Lady in this scorched earth to stop the manly march of Progress.

Was it not Comrade Stalin who chose a few volunteers to dig a few wee canals to reverse the flow of major rivers in the Motherland? *

This Final Solution would solve Unemployment, repel Illegal Boatpeople (who would row back quickly) and eradicate Adelaide in world record time.

* For a User Guide see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Construction_Projects_of_Communism Abbott's or even The Poodle's kind of 5 Year Plan.

Pete

Cobber you don't have to be a cotton, or any other type of farmer, to see that supplying eastern water to a water sky/sailing park in South Australia is very stupid.

It is also easy to see any supply to Melbourne or Sydney, of other peoples water is counter productive. Tell the over population to find somewhere they can be accommodated & supplied. Definitely do not allow any more housing to be built in these places. To spend taxpayer money on building public housing, & attracting more hangers on to these places can only be the action of fools.

Max T, I'm sorry but you are wrong, or illiterate or both.

The new Dutch (green) technology produces potable water, repeat, potable water and indeed, some Melbourne residents are already drinking it!

And for less than quarter of the price of conventional desal!

Which makes it also practical for some farming operations, were it is supplied as an underground application, via tapes laid directly under the seed beds of various crops.

And able to use around quarter of the water of topside applications for double the yield or harvest; or considerably less, if biodegradable plastic film is used topside!

Which by the way also allows planting to proceed as much as a month early, given retained heat assists normal germination.

And given much earlier planting, earlier harvesting becomes equally possible!

Moreover, given the application is below ground, recycled water is fine, and moreover, loaded with useful nutrients!

We're really lucky that solar activity seems to be waning at this point, (since the mid seventies) otherwise we might well and truly crossed the tipping point from which there could be no return, from where most life on earth would be extinguished.

The intractable greens just don't help with their blanket ban on dams, desalination and carbon free nuclear energy.

Perhaps when there's no food on the supermarket shelves they may start to sing a different tune, but it will be far too late by then!

I mean and think, dams allow the additional storage of irrigation water, and irrigation produces green cover, which in turn helps to cool things down a little; and exactly what mother nature tries to achieve with her greenhouse response!

And cheaper than coal thorium reactors connected to micro grids/half price power, make desal and all other energy reliant applications, vastly more economical/affordable.

Even so, as Has contends, there's more merit in moving the people to where we still have water; (the less costly option) than moving water to the people, and mostly to satisfy the needs of developers/Foreign nationals?
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty, Thank you for the compliment that I am "wrong, or illiterate or both". Was that intended as a thoughtful premise for reasoned discussion on such an important topic? I'm retired now but proud of my contribution to recycled water use over many decades, long before it became fashionable. You might be surprised to learn that I and others had to work very hard to counter 'green' opposition to some 'pioneering' water recycling schemes. I think we can agree that intractability is not conducive to progress. I would add, however, that it may not be exclusive to 'Greens' and it certainly isn't compatible with scientific method.

I may have misinterpreted your original statement: "And only doable due to the recent advances in desalinating water for a fraction of what it once cost; and at 97 recovery rates as fresh water; thanks to the innovative Dutch!" I took that to mean 97% of the salt was removed in the desalination process you mentioned. I will leave others to decide how that 'monument to literacy' should be understood.

Clearly, you have little understanding of irrigated agronomics. The chemistry of recycled water and the soils to which it is applied have to be properly understood and managed. The salt-tolerance and nutrient requirements of crops also influence the rate and timing of irrigation. With recycled water, these parameters may be quite different to 'conventional' irrigation. For instance, recycled water "loaded with useful nutrients" may be applied at the vegetative growth stage but may be very counterproductive later. I can suggest some very good study material if want to develop your interest further.