The millions of litres of water we pour out to sea as treated effluent from just Sydney and Melbourne would more than support our cotton crops and dry land rice, and only as taped underground applications.

A few years ago, space-age deionisation dialysis desalination was field trialled In Texas USA as cost effective broad scale irrigation, with resounding success, albeit their power cost just a third of ours!

Even so, we could have power one-third of their's with abandoned but not found technically wanting technology. And you guessed it that already proven technology is walk away safe, carbon-free MSR and thorium. And potential power prices as lower as sub 2 cents per KwH?

Time some of the naysayers got informed and could do worse than read Prize-winning investigative journalist and science writer, Richard Martin's book, Thorium, Super fuel, subtitled, green energy.
Alan B.

A significant, non-infrastructure, step to mitigate drought effect is personal and cultural. Namely, to encourage greater awareness of the effect of every action so that wastage of everything is lessened.
Many of those fortunate to have been deprived in earlier times of plentiful access to whatever they wanted would understand the truth of that old cliché "waste not, want not".
To many others, there is really no thought given about where each piece of food or each glass of water comes from.
After all, if you've only a half full water bottle, you become very conscious of how you use it.
We're not going to be able to 'human engineer' any attitude change except by an individual resolve to become more aware of causes, thus to ameliorate their effects.

We're not going to be able to 'human engineer' any attitude change except by an individual resolve to become more aware of causes, thus to ameliorate their effects.
Ponder,
Well, definitely not with an education system like ours & no national service.!
Making young people earn their money would also be a good start instead of travelling the globe paying no taxes & then demand a Pension.

Viv Forbes,
You started off well, but soon degraded into a lazy article full of fallacies and strawmen.

Had you bothered to understand those you criticise, you'd find that very few people are opposed to all dams, but there are some rivers that should never be dammed because of the rarity of ecosystems and/or species. And where dams are constructed, environmental flows should be maintained.

Changes in rules may seem annoying, but surely it's better than keeping bad policies like removing trees to allow floodwaters to get away quicker? And your outright lie that "the Murray-Darling Basin Plan which is part of a long term green plan to gradually smother farming, grazing and irrigation along the river" shows you to be a resentful prat who values neither the river nor the truth!

And the presence of tropical deserts should make you realise that the ink between warming and rain isn't as simple as you claim it to be. However much water's in the atmosphere, it's unlikely to rain in high pressure conditions, and global warming affects where those occur.
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ttbn,
Actually soil can be replaced. It is a renewable resource (though not an easily renewable resource).

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Alan B.,
We should certainly be making better use of the Great Artesian Basin, including recharging to more when water is abundant. But the northern GAB is underutilized with much of the water just flowing out to sea.

And if you want to desalinate with an electric (rather than distillatory or osmotic) process, CDI (capacitative deionization) is more efficient than ED.

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estelles,
The very thirsty crops like rice are generally not grown when water is in short supply.

Houelebecq,
A tip. When you add a link on this site delete the s from https and then the link will be active.

If Tony Abbbot was PM he could progress his governments initiative that led to the submission here; see Index F., Fairfax John C.

http://agwhitepaper.agriculture.gov.au/supporting-information/published-submissions-green-paper