Saturday 20th of April 2024
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too many cubbies .....

too many cubbies .....

After years of claims and counter-claims, new figures show cotton became the thirstiest crop in the whole Murray-Darling Basin two years ago, guzzling 20 per cent of all the water used for agriculture in region. 

A groundbreaking report on the Murray-Darling by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals cotton was "consistently the crop with the highest water consumption" from 2000-01 to 2005-06, followed by dairy farming, growing pasture for livestock and rice. 

And in key districts such as the Gwydir River in northern NSW, cotton used a whopping 87 per cent of the agricultural water in 2006. The numbers from the Border Rivers catchment, covering southern Queensland, reveal a similar story, with cotton using more than 80 per cent of agricultural water from that system. 

Cotton Sucking Life Out Of Murray 

and, from Crikey ….. 

Murray-Darling: Cubby Station has to go first 

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: 

So let’s, for just a moment, be fair to the Government.  

Yes, the Government has managed more in six months than all previous governments. Yes, the previous Government did nothing about the over-allocation of the Murray-Darling (which is "allocated to hell", according to Kevin Rudd, channelling the Duke again). And yes the new package of measures is a welcome step forward. The Government appears to have finally understood some of the urgency with which everyone else regards the issue.  

The initiatives announced last night are in effect a speed-up of current processes. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission will complete an audit of both private and public storages -- the information that everyone has complained has been missing from the debate so far. The audit will be reviewed by one of the big auditing firms.

The purchasing of water will be sped up, particularly in Queensland and South Australia with extra money available in Queensland, and the roll-out of water-saving infrastructure will be accelerated, including a pipeline from Tailem Bend to the Lower Lakes area to end the community’s reliance on the Lakes themselves for water.

These initiatives are unlikely to get to the Coorong the amount of water necessary, but it’s a start.  

The most significant new elements of the initiatives are commitments to offer a premium to entire communities willing to move out of irrigation, offering the opportunity for potentially significant water rights purchases. Amy Hankinson from the Inland Rivers Network says there are communities that would be interested in such a shift if assistance is available to help the transition to non-irrigation based production.  

The Government also committed to co-funding the purchase of properties as well as water rights in the northern basin, potentially tapping into existing storages that could be used immediately for environmental flows.  

Co-funded, that is, with state governments.  

Hmmm. Therein lies the problem. State governments aren’t merely the ones who f-cked the Murray-Darling in the first place, they continue to do everything in their power to resist the Commonwealth’s attempts to bring a system-wide perspective to its management. The idea of them signing up to spend money purchasing properties with the Commonwealth looks improbable at best.  

Still, it’s not a bad idea. The first property they should look at buying is Cubbie Station. It would, sadly, reward the owners who have exploited the Queensland Government’s profligate approach to water management and ripped off countless downstream farmers and irrigators, but that’s the unfortunate reality we’re stuck with.  

However, the package of measures does nothing to address the structural impediment posed by state governments to managing the Murray-Darling sustainably. Asa Wahlquist in The Australian has a spray today at the Queensland Government but it’s the Victorian Government, and its iniquitous adherence to its anti-competitive 4% water trading restriction, that is most responsible for this crisis, particularly as water from Victoria has much less distance to travel than water purchased up north.  

Let’s be clear about this: John Brumby’s 4% restriction -- an anti-competitive mechanism designed to artificially lift water price for owners -- is preventing purchases right now that could be sending water down to South Australia.  

In response, Cabinet declared that "the Commonwealth will actively pursue the implementation of water reform initiatives necessary to ensure the lifting of the 4 per cent limit on water and the application of that limit on a consistent basis as soon as possible." Mere words, which don’t get us anywhere closer than the notorious COAG "ambition" to lift the restriction to a whopping 6% earlier this year.  

The Government is also still refusing to come at compulsory acquisition or loans of water rights. Nor has it expressed interest in determining whether the NSW Government is gaming circumstances around the Menindee Lakes.  

Of equal concern is the performance of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission so far. It doesn’t say much for the body that is supposed to be shortly transformed into a new entity to manage the whole Basin sustainably. The Commission has been bureaucratic, cautious and feeble in handling the emerging crisis in the lower Murray -- perfectly demonstrating the point Ross Gittins regularly makes about how the lack of "proprietary rights" in environmental issues prevents policy makers in a market economy from dealing adequately with problems.  

Instead, it has taken a growing sense of outrage among South Australians -- fuelled by a strong perception that other states are ripping off their water -- to force the Government to look harder for solutions.  

However, as Greens senator Rachel Siewert told us, the state government water allocation plans remain in place; the dominant role of the states in the management of the system remains in place, and the 4% trading restriction is still blocking water purchases. The structural causes of the problem are there, and unless they’re addressed we’ll be facing the same crisis, in the Coorong or somewhere else, in another year or two.

word games .....

from Crikey ….. 

How Cubbie (and Labor) consumed the Murray Darling 

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: 

The extent of the Queensland Government’s parochial and profligate attitude to water management continues to attract criticism. Put simply, the Queenslanders couldn’t care less about the health of rivers either on their side of the border or beyond. Penny Wong can only wring her hands and sympathise with farmers downstream. 

The Queenslanders continue to trot out the line that they take only 5% of water from the Murray-Darling. It’s literally correct -- that’s what they take out. It’s what they prevent from entering from run-off that is the key -- and that is much more. The CSIRO’s recent report on Water Availability in the Condamine-Balonne reveals a vast and unsustainably over-allocated system that sees over 50% of water extracted from the Balonne-Culgoa before it reaches NSW.  

You don’t need to go down into the Darling or further on into the Murray to see the environmental havoc wrought by the Queenslanders. Lightning Ridge station owner and Western Catchment Management Authority chairman Ross Treweeke, who has been battling the Queensland Government’s profligate approach to water licensing for decades, told us about thousands of hectares of dead trees on the Culgoa floodplain and a system approaching tipping point. Treweeke said that the comments of Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water’s Ross Krebs to The Australian said it all. "Krebs complains that run-off 'breaks out into floodplains or alternatively feeds into terminal wetlands resulting in a great loss of this water' -- that sums up the attitude of the Queenslanders -- water shouldn’t be ‘lost’ to the environment." 

For years, Cubbie Group -- the vast cancer on the Balonne-Culgoa which exemplifies all that is wrong with the states’ management of water -- has maintained that it only extracts 0.2% of Murray-Darling water. Fair Water Use Australia has pointed out that this ignores the bulk of Cubbie’s water -- from overland flows prevented from entering the Balonne and Culgoa Rivers -- and that the 0.2% is based on average flows anyway, rather than conditions following heavy rains. 

That said, Cubbie Group and other Queensland irrigators are only doing what they have been permitted to do by the Queensland Government. Moreover, the development of a monster like Cubbie Station has been permitted by both sides of Queensland politics. In an outstanding article in 2000, journalist Phil Dickie explored the outrageous circumstances that fostered the development of Cubbie Station in the late 1980s and 1990s -- including the fact that it pays just $3700 a year for an allocation of over 500,000 ML of water, and that National Party politicians had intervened favourably on Cubbie’s behalf.  

Dickie also noted that Cubbie’s biggest period of expansion was during the Goss Government, which declined to require Environmental Impact Statements or any other regulatory assessment as Cubbie exploited Queensland’s lax water allocation and planning laws to establish vast dams -- even as neighbours in the region were prevented from building far smaller dams. 

The Goss Government’s Treasurer, Keith De Lacy, is now Cubbie Group chairman. Goss’s chief of staff, of course, is now Prime Minister. And Cubbie Group is today plugged straight into Queensland’s business elite, with De Lacy and former executive of State Government-owned investment company QIC Peter Forbes on the board. Until earlier this year, when he headed to Canada to take over the Canadian Wheat Board, former Queensland Sugar head and Queensland Competition Authority member Ian White was also on the board (it’s an incestuous world in Queensland business – White’s chairman at Queensland Sugar was De Lacy, who was also on the Macarthur Coal board with Forbes -- headed by Ken Talbot, famous for his loan to Labor Minister Gordon Nuttall). 

Cubbie obviously isn’t just well-connected on the ALP side. Its joint managing director John Grabbe is a National Party stalwart. And it has its own Senator, Barnaby Joyce, a grateful recipient of donations from Cubbie and Grabbe and a dogged advocate of Cubbie’s interests in the Senate. 

Today’s revelations by Asa Wahlquist, and the blatant breach of Queensland’s inter-governmental agreement with NSW on development on the Paroo River demonstrates that the Queenslanders continue to be as parochial as ever about their approach to water resources. The Queensland Government -- regardless of political orientation -- simply doesn’t care about anyone downstream. 

Meantime, Penny Wong talks about water buybacks and how the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority will improve things. Let’s hope she changes the new Authority’s advisors. The current Murray-Darling Basin Commission advisory committee includes John Grabbe. Not content with preventing water from reaching the Murray-Darling, Cubbie Group gets to influence the management of the entire Basin. 

The only real solution is to remove the states from management of the basin entirely. On the evidence, they can’t be trusted and they don’t care.

last gasps .....

Pia Ackerman in The Australian reports that the acid sulphate soils, which threaten the Murray's lower lakes in South Australia, have spread to the river system's northern catchments in Queensland where up to 200 sites are under investigation by scientists.  

Pockets of acidification are also emerging in northern Victoria and along the Murray River in south-western NSW. Acid sulphate soils can occur when river and lake beds are exposed to the air as water levels fall, triggering a toxic chemical reaction. 

The Murray-Darling Basin Commission ordered the investigation in southern Queensland amid mounting evidence that wetlands and rivers in the north of the system were succumbing to the poisoning that threatened to overwhelm. More than 12,000 wetlands are potentially at risk in Queensland alone. 

This is yet another sign of the consequences of taking too much water from the rivers by irrigators. Not that much will be done by Rudd and Wong to address the situation, judging by the way they handled the situation in the lower Lakes.  

It was a too little too late style of management in buying back over-allocated water licences.  

Murray Darling Basis: More Bad News