As the drought rolls relentlessly on, with little sign of the "break" we are all waiting for, it's becoming harder to focus on any other topic but water.
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Never before in our recorded history have we faced a water shortage crisis as dire and as widespread as that now gripping eastern Australia. Water might have been just as scarce in earlier droughts, but we didn't have a population growing at an unsustainable rate - or the water-reliant regional industries - we have now.
Many regional towns and cities are now in countdown mode of weeks or months to running out of water altogether. Some are already reliant on tankers to bring water from elsewhere, but those "elsewheres" are also on borrowed time, not helped in northern NSW by the ramped-up water use demanded by firefighting efforts.
We might yet become reliant on drinking water from Sydney's desalination plant, the construction of which earned brickbats at the time for the prescient Labor premier, Morris Iemma.
No less worrying is the outlook for our food producing industries, as irrigation water - if available at all - becomes priced out of reach to all but investor-funded owners of permanent plantations.
It's not hard to understand why Murray Valley irrigators rallying at Tocumwal earlier this month demanded that the contentious Murray-Darling Basin Plan be paused, and reviewed. But the plan is only part of the problem, albeit a major part, as precious water is sent coursing down the Murray, past mothballed irrigation farms, to evaporate in South Australia's Lower Lakes.
Just as important is the need to rethink how our inland water is used, captured, shared and prioritised.
Was it all that sensible really, for instance, to separate irrigation water rights from the land to which they used to be attached, resulting in the "hollowing-out" of former irrigation communities and the growth of desk-jockey water traders and hoarders?
Then there's the vexed ethical question relating to the harvesting and impounding of overland flows - often a key selling point of an irrigation farm, but doesn't this water rightly belong to the river?
And at times like this, there is surely a justification for winding back a stressed river's environmental allocation in favour of productive irrigation - above all to grow food for our home market.
And speaking of food for the home market, it's well past time for government intervention to save what's left of our dairy industry, before there isn't a teat-puller left standing. The market has clearly failed, and what's needed is for the government to mandate a serious rise in retail milk prices sufficient to offset farmers' huge drought-driven cost increases in water and fodder.
Milk, by virtue of its daily production/consumption pattern, is one agricultural commodity that lends itself to price regulation. What's needed is an excise tax, like the government imposes on petrol (to the tune of 38 cents a litre), with the funds so raised heading straight back to the dairies, by-passing all middlemen.
- PETER AUSTIN
