Thankyou Mr Brumby for injecting some sense into an emotive issue, there really isn't water available to do all that we want for the Murray mouth, lakes and Coorong. The river has run short of water just as it has many times in the past, only storages like Hume and Dartmouth have ensured that the river has been able to supply water as far as Adelaide. Only the barrages prevent nature from replacing the water evaporated from the lakes with seawater as it used to, and I believe altering the tidal flux which affects the Coorong and mouth.
The barrages were built(1930's)long before cotton was grown in the basin, and the Murray had often run dry previous to rices introduction in the 20's.

geoffalford, thats an interesting supposition re:rice and cotton, but don't you think a farmer allocated water will use that water to his/her best return, and use all of that allocation for whatever crop they grow. If the farmer is entitled to say 200 megalitres of water does it really matter whether that water is extracted for rice or a timber plantation. What you should really be saying is that you think too much water is licensed for extraction, cotton and rice being an extraneous issue.

One might even go so far as to say that since Australian farmers are the worlds most efficient convertors of water to cotton and rice that more of them should be grown here and less of the things we are less efficient at. We grow more than twice the amount of both cotton and rice than the world average per litre of water, with the top ranking for rice(Australia uses 33% of the water per kg as Bangladesh, and only 20% of what Cambodia uses). Info from FAO via www.waterfootprint.org

1: The single authority could have been established during the Howard govt but Victoria refused, the situation was urgent enough then.

2:There is nothing to spare from the Goulburn River, all diversions South deplete the supply all the way to SA. Improvements to irrigation should have been done long ago. It is crazy to allocate an uncertain supply to a large city that is growing by 1400 per week. Remember the promises about the Snowy river back in the 50s? Melbourne would take more and more. As a Melburnian I want us to deal locally with our situation, tanks, nuclear, recycle, whatever it takes.

There is supposedly a lot of concern about water supplies drying up with climate change, yet the government and its corporate sponsors are aggressively increasing the size of the Australian population and the number and intensity of uses for water. They are allocating more to water intensive industry, much of it unhealthy for humans and cruel (feedlot farming); soil destructive (vineyards and agribusiness broadacre), AND subsidised byYOUR taxes.

They are effectively privatising water, both for its agricultural uses (The Foodbowl unlimited corporatisation of the Riverina) and for the power it produces (Rudd’s scheme to ‘lease’ the Snowy Hydro.

Water is extremely valuable because it sustains life, but the government is interested in the commercial value of water which can be obtained by commodifying it. The major steps towards this have been achieved already through the bundling of water titles separate from land-titles. Farmers in trouble during the drought have been so stretched for cash to survive that they have reluctantly cashed in their water titles. Portions of these land-titles have been made available by the government to investors who have no use for the water except to make money. These investors' speculatory activities, combined with the general greedy draw on water by agribusinesses able to pay big prices for it (which they pass on to you, my dears), have pushed the prices way beyond what ordinary farmers, let alone drought-affected ones, can afford to buy back the water. Now agribusiness and land developers are grabbing the land and the water.

We don’t just need to get our water back. We need to get our land and our democracy back.

Hey all,
I see that still no-one wants to administer the "hard task"

Remove all lochs and let it run.
You want water? then pump it and store it while its there.
What about the growers? Improvize,store more water, move on.

It didn't take many years to kill the Murray but it will take a lot longer to recover and many will have to move anyway.

I left the Murray back in the 70's because it was buggered then, talking to brick walls was well underway then too.

NT.

The scene....The banks of the Goulburn River near Seymour (Vic.)

The date....2047

The Father and his son

Son: Why are all the old trees(Red Gums) dead dad?

Father: Oh well son, years ago a premier decided to pump water to the city in a big pipeline (North South) and the River and its surrounding vegetation just died.

Son: Why didn't people do something?

Father: Sometimes politicians like power...look son some bubbles....it might be a lone surviving carp!

I would like to reply to the post by Judy Spence concerning the nuclear desalination of seawater. I'll state first, so you know, that I am Tony (Antony) Boys, one of the authors of the book the Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Ed. (Editor Sheila Newman) to be published by Pluto later this month, and I write on food and energy issues in Japan.

Firstly, desalination is not really all that "popular" in Japan. Please see:

Saturday, Dec. 14, 2002, Farm minister puts lid on 'wasteful' <a href="http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20021214a8.html">
desalination project</a>

The main reason is that Japan has (in MOST years) ample rainfall and there is really little call for it.

Secondly, if there is nuclear desalination in Japan I have not heard of it and cannot find references to it on Google and so on, so could you please furnish a concrete reference to such an example that is operating now? There may be one - more a question of my ignorance than me accusing you of a falsification - but it also strikes me as the kind of thing that is often thrown out as a justification for nuclear energy, that very few people actually want, rather than something that is really necessary, useful or advisable.

Thirdly, with respect to Australia, which you know far more about than I do, do Australians really want to get heavily involved in nuclear power just for the sake of desalination of seawater? Does the means really fit the ends, serious as the situation may be? Australia has uranium resources, but not everyone is happy about uranium mining (as in other countries). Nuclear power itself, especially the siting of reactors, can be an extremely difficult issue fraught with emotional complexities. If it's a choice between starvation and nuclear desalination, many may choose nuclear desalination. However, I suggest there are other technologies which result in the same ends, but in fewer problems farther down the road. What do you think?