Privatising our water

Brushing aside overwhelm-ing evidence of disastrous 
environmental, economic and social consequences, NSW Planning 
Minister Craig Knowles last week gave the state's major 
irrigators lifetime perpetual rights to our water. This will 
further reduce the future downstream flow of the dying Murray-
Darling river system.

This latest move by the Carr Government is part of an overall 
water management plan, in which river water is converted into a 
commodity, with some water allocated for environmental and other 
purposes, but with water licence holders able to sell off what 
they don't need to government authorities through a tender 
system.

The vast amounts of water siphoned off for years by the 
agribusiness monopolies has become a matter of bitter contention 
between them, other farmers, scientists and affected communities. 
The Government's plan, which is in fact a form of privatisation, 
will deepen the hostilities.

Irrigators in south-west Queensland regularly divert Culgoa River 
floodwater onto their properties, preventing the major part of 
the flow from reaching areas downstream in NSW and Victoria via 
the Murray-Darling system. Reservoirs constructed on these 
properties have a combined capacity twice that of Sydney Harbour. 
The biggest of these, cotton giant Cubbie Station in Queensland, 
holds three quarters of this volume.

Because the new system allows water licence holders to sell to 
others, including to governments themselves, it means in reality 
that the "water barons" and the market are increasingly 
determining how our most critical natural resource is managed.

This form of privatisation has been compared to the sell-off of 
Telstra or the Commonwealth Bank. The NSW scheme is a foretaste 
of a plan designed to operate on a nation-wide basis, formulated 
by scientist Professor Peter Cullen.

This how Cullen puts the spin on it: "The taxpayer has got an 
interest here in getting the water in the cheapest possible way, 
which is why I'm advocating the tender-based buyback, because 
that way we'll get the most water for the least price."

Those promoting it — including the Federal Government — claim 
the system will convince the irrigation agribusinesses to reduce 
their consumption of water. (The CSIRO has calculated that the 
use of water for irrigation purposes doesn't make much economic 
sense. In order to generate $1 of product output, cultivation of 
rice and cotton require 7000 and 1600 litres of water 
respectively.)

In fact, given the desperate shortage of river water in general, 
the agribusinesses may find the trade in water more profitable 
than the production of crops. If so, the government will simply 
have burdened the nation with a layer of totally unproductive 
middle men with a stranglehold on our most precious natural 
resource — a resource which should rightfully belong to the 
people and be managed by government.

The value of water rights to some NSW farms is already greater 
than the value of the land itself.

Up till now water users in NSW were granted their licences on a 
15-year basis (the so-called "permanent" licences). However, 
under the new scheme water users would be granted licences on a 
perpetual basis, and their operation would be conditional on 10-
year government reviews of rainfall patterns and other factors.

The state governments are arguing that if the terms of the 
licences need to be reviewed at the expiry of a 10-year period, 
the licence-holder would not be entitled to compensation.

But the Federal Government wants to give irrigators the right to 
sue for damages if their access to water is restricted by 
government to, for example, protect the environment or for the 
benefit of town and city water.

Rather than tackling the problem by restricting the water 
available to the agribusinesses, and simply charging them for the 
amount they actually use, the government has preserved in 
perpetuity the rights they currently enjoy to squander this 
priceless resource.

The NSW scheme and Cullen's national plan both fail to deal with 
the harsh reality that Australia is the most arid continent on 
earth, and that our rainfall is certain to fall if global warming 
continues.

That governments are allowing this resource to be turned into a 
commodity in order to fatten the profits of a handful of 
corporations is nothing less than criminal.