There is much comment in the Australian media about water shortages and prominent in this whole “debate” is the Wentworth Group, who are held out to be water experts and Professor Peter Cullen, of Canberra I think, often seems to speak for the Wentworth Group. I have just noticed a recent news item, copied below, where Prof Cullen commences by restating some popular mantras.
“Much of Australia seems to be drying and we are now facing real water scarcity for many of our cities and for rural areas. This crisis in The Murray-Darling Basin has been brought on by the climate shift and the serious drought..”.

The black trendline on this BoM rainfall history 1900-2006 for the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) shows the 1940’s were dryer than now and there is NO evidence in these data of a climate shift. It is perfectly clear that current dryer conditions are normal cyclic events to be expected and that planning of urban water infrastructure has failed to keep pace with population and consumption trends.

I agree with many of the other points in the article and fully expect that Wentworth Group people will dominate the “experts” group to be appointed under the Federal Governments new plans.

It is worth making the point here that high rainfall in the 30 years from the late 1940’s could well have been due in part to the post WWII airborne cloud seeding experiments. So it is ironic that our whole structure of State water allocations might have been warped by a process that has been stopped now for 20 or so years.
Souirce for graphic;www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi

Last Update: Tuesday, March 13, 2007. 11:39am (AEDT)
ABC online news
Facing up to the Murray-Darling crisis
By Peter Cullen

Much of Australia seems to be drying and we are now facing real water scarcity for many of our cities and for rural areas.

This crisis in The Murray-Darling Basin has been brought on by the climate shift and the serious drought we are now seeing, but the fact that we allowed the system to run to empty is another symptom of our failure to manage the waters of the basin in a sustainable way and now many communities and the environment are suffering what may be permanent damage.

The partnership of six governments attempting to manage the basin, developed over a century of conflict about water, worked adequately in a time of expansion and growth, but over the last decade has shown itself unable to come to terms with over allocation and cope with a drying basin.

The Prime Minister has recognised this failure of governance of the basin and has addressed it with his proposal that powers be transferred to the Commonwealth to manage the basin as a single system and providing $10 billion to address water security issues in Australia. Most commentators have welcomed the Prime Minister’s plan, and there is widespread agreement that something had to be done. Even Victoria, so far refusing to sign the agreement, acknowledges that action is needed; they just differ on the means. While welcoming the initiative, many are concerned about the detail as to what has to happen and are concerned they will suffer.

As we confront the challenges of the Murray-Darling Basin, let us agree on the overall objective, for which I believe there is wide consensus. We seek a healthy river and we seek to share the available water in a fair way between the cities and rural communities dependent on the river. Let us not lose sight of this shared outcome, although there will be much to argue over in terms of the necessary actions to bring this about.

The principles for going forward are clear, and have already been agreed by the Prime Minister and the premiers in the National Water Initiative. In going forward the Prime Minister and the signatory premiers have accepted that we need to manage the basin as a single system, not as a series of vaguely connected pieces.

I intend to address seven key actions that I believe to be important in delivering a sustainable Murray-Darling Basin.

1. Stop further extractions. A moratorium on any further extractions of water from the basin is needed until sustainable levels of extraction have been established and demonstrated. This includes extractions of surface or groundwater, on stock and domestic extractions and on interception activities like farm dams and plantations. All extractions must be licensed and measured.

A compliance regime must be established to address the widespread theft of water in irrigation and dryland areas that is stealing water from downstream entitlement holders and the environment.

2. Establish sustainable levels of extraction. Ecological systems have a certain capacity to recover from changes. As wet and dry periods come along, different sets of organisms are favoured and may become dominant, but most still have the capacity to hang on until times favour them again. We call this the resilience of systems. We now appreciate that the resilience of a system is an important element in allowing it to cope with changed circumstances. We also appreciate that we have often reduced the natural resilience of systems, thus making them vulnerable to collapse when conditions change.

There is widespread agreement that the basin as a whole is over-allocated, but there is no agreement as to what are sustainable levels of extraction. Jurisdictions have all had differing definitions of over allocation. Some use a simple hydraulic approach that if water is there it can’t be over allocated, totally ignoring the impacts on downstream river health.

A high-level expert scientific group needs to be established to advise the new Murray-Darling Authority (MDA) to propose an interim approach to defining sustainable levels of extraction from rivers and groundwater systems for different climate zones within the MDB. Their immediate task is to determine how to implement the Living Murray target of returning 1,500GL of water to the main stem of the Murray, and provide an appropriate target for the Darling.

This group should be charged with identifying the maximum possible consumptive pool of water that can be taken from the system to support agriculture and communities, while maintaining acceptable river health. This expert group should review the assembled scientific basis for flow guidelines for each tributary and reach of the river to ensure they are based on the best available scientific advice and that the agreed methods are used. This scientific assessment must be public and will probably be contested by various interest groups.

The new MDA should consider this expert advice and agree on timetables to restore systems to sustainable levels of extraction. They also need to establish ways of reviewing the sustainable levels as more information is gained about river health, and as the climate shift becomes more apparent.

We need to accelerate the implementation of the Sustainable Rivers Audit across the Basin so we have an ongoing measurement of river health to inform the community and decision makers and validate or allow revision of the scientific judgments being made.

3. Build a single register of all water entitlements. States have been developing their own registries of water entitlements, and all are at different stages of development. Like the railways of the 1800s, there are serious concerns that these individual registries will not be compatible across state borders. This would inhibit the development of an effective water market across the basin. Many registries of groundwater licences are rudimentary or absent.

We need to review the registry efforts of each jurisdiction and develop a single registry based on the nest elements of each and implement as a single register across the basin for all surface and groundwater entitlements.

4. Seasonal allocations of water. Holders of each water entitlement get an annual allocation of water. The entitlement, while specified as a volume of water is really a share of the available consumptive pool of water and the seasonal allocation is like a dividend payment.

It seems that with the climate shift we are now experiencing inflows to the basin are around half of what they were in earlier wetter times, it may be that the annual allocation of water will now only ever be around half of what the entitlement notionally says. This is how the system has always worked, and entitlement holders cannot expect to get access to water that doesn’t exist, not should they expect to pinch someone else’s water, including that allocated to the environment.

Seasonal allocations must be made periodically, giving a share of the defined consumptive pool to entitlement holders

Allocations can be traded on the water market, allowing those with greater need to purchase the water they require. This includes towns dependent of the river for domestic supplies that should have a basic water capita entitlement and should purchase additional water.

The environmental manager should enter the water market in particular valleys to acquire water for the environment as required for nominated ecological assets, and transfer this water to an environmental trust as a water entitlement with the same characteristics of the entitlements held by irrigators.

The Government may also enter the water market to acquire entitlements where reconfiguring of irrigation systems makes ongoing supply to particular regions not economically viable.

5. Establish an independent environmental water manager. It is not appropriate to have the organisation that manages the physical infrastructure or that makes allocations also act as the environmental manager. The environmental manager may be seeking to trade water, and there would be conflicts of interest if they both set the operating rules and acted as trader.

Water plans will identify particular environmental assets that need particular watering regimes, and the general health of the river will be assessed by the Sustainable Rivers Audit.

An independent environmental manager needs to be established to acquire and manage environmental water to protect identified environmental assets and the general health of the river system (river stem, floodplain and wetlands and estuary). The environmental manager needs to determine appropriate watering regimes and be responsible for both rule based and licence based water to ensure maintenance of the environmental assets. The manager should have the capacity to buy and sell on the water market.

6. Smart infrastructure investment. The Government has allocated $6 billion to upgrade water infrastructure. It is apparent that the irrigation industry we developed in the 20th century has been unable to create enough wealth to pay its way. The amount collected from irrigators for water has clearly not been sufficient to maintain infrastructure, and now the taxpayers are expected to rebuild a run down system.

Australia does need an efficient irrigation industry that can crate enough wealth to pay its way. It is therefore important that we take this opportunity to build a new irrigation system for the 21st century, not just rebuild the failed system of the past.

The irrigation of the 21st century must at least double the wealth, from half of the water. It will do with smart measurement, good control systems, and delivery of water to plant roots, reduction in wastage like evaporation and seepage and perhaps new crops and new industries.

There will be many proposals brought to Government to fund the replacement of infrastructure that people have not bothered to maintain. These should be rejected. All infrastructure investments must be subjected to serious cost benefit and environmental assessment and we should only invest where the irrigation can create sufficient wealth to pay the full costs of the infrastructure and its operation, and the environmental externalities. That is what sustainability is about. Investment should only proceed when all of the principles of the National Water Initiative are in place,

Irrigation companies will develop investment plans for their systems and for individual farms. These investment proposals need to be assessed by the new MDA, and these assessments should be public. They should confirm that all elements of the NWI are in place, that pricing is appropriate to pay the costs and that customers can create sufficient wealth to pay for the investments.

Better water measurement within the distribution system and on farms is essential to effective management of water. An audit should be undertaken of flow measurement at all major off-takes to ensure irrigators are actually getting their entitlement, and not more.

Funds have been allocated to the Bureau of Meteorology to update the river flow measuring systems and develop a real time web-based reporting system for river flow. In my view we need to commit around $200 million to a Murray-Darling Basin groundwater assessment program to identify sustainable yields of groundwater systems. This requires a series of observation bores and pumping tests, again with public reporting of data and interpretations.

We need an increased investment in irrigation research to build these new irrigation industries.

7. Integrate the management of land and water. We know that what happens on land determines the amount and quality of water in rivers, and the specific statements in the Prime Minister’s plan focus on water quality require a strong linkage to land management to control salinity, turbidity from erosion and nutrients causing algal blooms.

The Federal Government has been investing through the Natural Heritage Trust and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality in the development of regional catchment management bodies and these could provide an ideal vehicle to deliver various elements of the Plan.

Individual valleys already have, or need to have, targets for the export of water, nutrients, salt and turbidity from their valleys to the main river stem. The National Water Initiative specifies the need to control interception activities of plantation forests and farm dams, and the catchment management authorities (CMAs) would be well placed to set local rules and assist with compliance in these areas, as well as with pollutants. The CMAs already have a role in riparian management and repair, and the identification and measurement of the health of environmental assets

Involve the CMAs in developing and implementing the basin-wide plan, through the identification of environmental assets, the approval of interception activities, and the management of nutrient and soil pollutants to waterways. The MDA needs to establish guidelines and have an audit role, but local management of many of these activities is necessary.

The previous governance of the basin failed because powerful interest groups were able to stall actions they felt might hurt them. These interest groups are still pushing their rights to whatever water remains in the basin, and the Federal Government will not find these issues easy to resolve either.

The National Water Initiative envisages that a market will be used to allocate water between competing uses once the consumptive pool of water is identified. This market should include cities and towns dependent on the waters of the Basin, although many will argue they should be excluded from this competitive arena and just given the water they seek. If water is to be recovered fro the environment it can be recovered through purchase on the water market or through improving the efficiency of infrastructure.

In the past with multiple governments involved it has been easy to blame the other levels of government for the failure to confront these issues. The Commonwealth will no longer have anyone with which to share the blame and will have to make some tough decisions that will be highly contested. They will be responsible for deciding the consumptive pool of water available to be traded, and for establishing market rules and access conditions and prices that give us a sustainable system.

The Commonwealth has not had experience in operating a water system such as the Murray-Darling Basin, and will need quickly to build its technical skill base in hydrology, freshwater ecology, irrigation and water economics.

Professor Peter Cullen is a commissioner of the National Water Commission. This is an extract from his address to the Brisbane Institute.