When will right wing politicians realise that not everything is "for sale" and certainly not one of life's essential elements. We elect Governments to manage and provide essential services, because we do not trust business to do the right thing by consumers. I have for example recently learned that most ice-cream contains pig fat to bulk it up, odourless, colourless bulking agent.

Water falls from the sky, that all of us do not have the ability economicly to purchase large rainwater tanks to supplement our water supply is irrelevant to this issue. We pay our taxes, and we expect value for money, it is as simple as that. If we shop at Big W, we expect likewise, but do not necessarily recieve it.

This is why we elect Government to manage these things, so if they do not, we have a chance to remove them from office. We can not remove Big W from trading, however we can stop a Government which is not governing, provided we have an alternative for whom to vote. At present, we do not have that option, and it's long overdue that we did.

In Chaos theory, when the number of consumers times their consumption rate exceeds the replenishment rate of an essential resouce you get a chaotic consumer population collapse. This collapse is mathematically undefinable, most often very violent and prevails until consumer numbers again make the resource viable.

It is true of Australia's water resources.

Although mathematically undefinable, the solution to the outcome will entail Federal and State Governments abandoning their lofty aspirations for bigger denser populations in city centres, large monopoly bank owned agriculture enterprises and the emergence of Australia and especially its leaders as world powers.

This is already becoming evident in NSW and it will rapidly accelerate.

The Federal government may be surprised to learn that on pure geographical analyses, Australia is destined to have a carrying capacity of around 23 million, Tasmania 40 million and New Zealand 6o million.

I'd like to see how they fit that into their self interest distorted NWI.

In the meantime the QUALITY of LIFE for the 23 million destined residents of Australia will depend NOT on how we manage water reserves but how we manage our land and our geography, to encourage more water to enter the continent from coastal rain bands.

Continental Thermodynamic manipulation is the answer. The way to achieve this is:

* Patchwork flooding of South Australia's salt lakes using solar desal technology and canals and pipes from Port Augusta. This will very slightly cool central SA and allow purely coastal rain bands entry to NSW and Victoria on a more regular basis.

* Creation of 100,000 engineered wetlands (EWBs) at strategic catchment saddle points all across Australia. This retains desert heat energy which can WORK for the country. It currently moves in atmospheric and oceanic gyres to the roaring forties where it does a fine job of melting fringe ice caps, much to the delight of fundie Greenhouse Warmers.

So how many funding applications does ANU have in train that can expect improved prospects as a result of this exposure? All good motherhood stuff but nothing that would make me more confident in ANU's capacities.

Come back when you have a set of maps of the Murray Darling system that shows the extent of deviation from presettlement mean stream flows, both positive and negative, on a monthly, quarterly, annual and decadal basis. Factor in increased water yield from past clearing, deduct reduced water yield from regrowth, identify wasted evaporation from shallow, grossly inefficient storages like Menindee Lakes, Lake Alexandrina etc and compare actual so-called environmental releases today with pre-settlement 10 decile ranges.

And even then we still reserve the right to kick the crap out of the NWI because it has the gall to suggest that "diverters" (farmers) have to bear the risk posed to water yields by incompetent fire hazard management in National Parks.

If this article is an indicator of your grasp of the issues then it might be best to take a look at what other institutions can offer.

What a joke of an article, semantic rubbish. I wonder if those that wrote it actually understand that they said nothing. They certainly are a product of the current approach to edcuation, sure is an example of what we have to look forward to if we have to rely on these educated types to advise us.

Acually I feel so sorry for them both, as they will see in a few years how inadequate their edcuation has been and how unprepared for life they are. But I expect they will get a good paying job in the PS or teach. That thought frightens me.

The National Water Initiative seems to be fundamentally flawed in that there is nothing mentioned in the aims to even suggest that the continuously increasing demand on water resources, caused predominantly by increasing populations, will be in any way addressed. Neither does this objective appear in any of the associated organisations. The NWI must therefore be considered largely defeated before it even started, because the rate of increasing demand is set to overwhelm or at least significantly dilute just about any gains that can be made in other areas, at least in urban and expanding agricultural areas, and whole vast regions such as SEQ, coastal NQ and coastal SW WA. As per usual with these sorts of things, the continuous growth factor is completely ignored.

“The NWI recognises that sustainability must be the first priority in principle”. Obviously they don’t have a clue about what real sustainability means. It is impossible with the blind acceptance of continuous unending human expansion.

“…it appears dominated by a determination to promote water markets.”

So it is actively promoting the increase in demand!!

“Even a quick reading, however, shows the NWI is fundamentally a policy designed to achieve environmental sustainability.”

Oh please!!

And in the very next sentence; “much of the NWI focuses on the promotion of economic activity”

It is just a rolling series of complete contradictions!

It seems that this is just another example of our manic pro-growth government trying to pull the wool over our eyes, by pretending that they are addressing sustainability issues while charging forth in the most totally unsustainable manner at the behest of their vested-interest big-business buddies.

Don't fall off your chair, Ludwig, when I say there is some merit in your point. The prevailing urban doctrine on sustainability of water use is the oft attributed response from an Adelaide City bureaucrat as to how they will deal with increasing demand for urban water; "Oh, we'll just put a few more rice growers out of business".

The current conflict between ever expanding urban use and the maintenance of existing rural use is one that crops up (sic) whenever an urban majority government is put to the test of delivering justice to both the majority urban and minority rural interests. And of course, the minority farmers always get done over. It is the same from Los Angeles to Adelaide. And it is done in a context of disgraceful waste by the urban majority.

This is unlikely to be the case if the negotiations are between two states, with one leader representing an urban position and the other representing a rural position. That is the only way to ensure that the science can be fully tested by competing, publicly funded teams and argued by equal competing parties.

Continued.