Australian Water Management Review Vol 1 2010 | Page 10

Troubled Waters
Climate change raises the bar on Australian water reform

Too many Australians still pin
their hopes on the mantra
“When the rains come again...”
– rather than recognising the
reality in their rain gauges,
dams, rivers and bores, a
major new report finds
As drought tightens its grip on the
nation’s throat and a changing climate
foreshadows dry times ahead, Australia’s
leading water experts have warned that
we must go faster and further in changing
the way we use and care for our scarce
and precious water.
Despite steady deterioration in both
quantity and quality of water over large
areas, Australia as a whole is failing to
meet the challenge of emerging scarcity,
Australian Water Reform 2009, the second
major review of the state of the nation’s
water management warns.
This two-yearly assessment by the
National Water Commission (NWC) is the
sharp end of the National Water Initiative,
a regular report on progress under the
agreement by Australian governments
to make our water use more efficient,
secure and sustainable. The report details
significant and heartening progress
towards water reform in many areas – but
finds that, overall, reform has been too
slow and fragmentary to keep up with the
changing climate.
“In many places water is still seriously
overallocated and overused. Water
markets are not functioning as freely as
they should, and this is dragging out the
uncertainty for farmers and other users.
The Australian landscape is still not getting
its fair share of water, and many iconic
places are it a critical state. All told there
needs to be a far greater sense of urgency
in how we manage our water,” says
Commission Chair Ken Matthews
Symbolising the situation facing most
of Australia’s fresh waters and their
management nationwide, overallocation
and overuse continue to bedevil efforts
to put the Murray-Darling Basin’s
waters on a planned and sustainable
footing, the NWC says. Irrigation
industries and their communities are
struggling, native ecosystems dying,

Water Management Review 2010

surface and groundwater water quality
and supplies declining.
Behind this lies stubborn wrangling
between the partner governments over
the meanings of ‘overallocation’ and
‘overuse’, a failure to introduce and
implement effective water plans in
some catchments badly needing them,
obstacles to trade in water which hinder
adjustment, efficiency and development,
disputes over the environment’s share of
water and a still widespread reluctance to
accept that surface and groundwater are
often connected.
Despite these setbacks, however, the
report finds real improvements both in
our understanding of how much water we
actually have – and in our ability to trade
in water so it flows more freely to the
most efficient and competitive end-use.
If Australia doesn’t measure up to its
own exacting standards of what needs to
be done in water, there is nevertheless
international admiration for what has been
achieved so far – from a world in which
nearly every country has yet to come
to grips with the realities of a climate
radically different from the one in which
humans have evolved.
“The take-home message for every
Australian is that, notwithstanding some
progress, our water is still in trouble – and
reform must be driven farther and faster
than ever,” Ken says.

Planning

Water planning may sound like a dry
argument to the public, but it holds the
key to Australia’s future. Not only does it
involve understanding how much water
we have, but good plans set out clearly
how it can be best shared between
the economy, the community and the
environment.
Australia’s states and territories have
committed to completing 195 water

plans. So far, they have only completed
112 plans. Only 22 new plans have been
introduced in the last two years, when
the nation was supposedly pursuing major
changes. This situation, in the words of
the Commission, is “critically inadequate”.
It calls for a renewed sense of urgency
about rolling out good quality water plans
by local authorities.
Also while most water plans provide
well for the physical resource and its
economic uses, many are weak when it
comes to the social and environmental
uses of water. There is, in particular,
a need to ensure enough water is
returned to the environment to protect
the Australian landscape and its iconic
places, the Commission says. Many
plans also fail to properly take account
of likely future drying in the climate.
There is a lack of openness about telling
the community what changes in water
availability really mean, especially when
it comes to how water plans will deal
with trade-offs between competing
uses. There is also a failure to engage
Indigenous people in water planning.
Progress in mapping the links between
surface and groundwater and building
them into plans has been slow.
Climate change will have a big impact on
whether these plans succeed – or whether
they fail, with disastrous consequences
for the industries, towns, people and
ecosystems affected. For example, the
Commission estimates that in the order
of 30% less water could be available for
irrigated agriculture in northern Victoria in
the years ahead. Critical to effective water
planning is knowing the size of the total
water resource – and the Commission’s
latest report foreshadows the end of
casual exploitation of water as a “free
good” that anyone could harvest by
scraping up a small dam or sinking a bore.
In future all bores should have a licence,
it says.