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.