Our political leaders — at least, the Prime Minister, the Premiers of NSW, Victoria and South Australia, and the mayor of Canberra — issued a statement yesterday on the Murray-Darling Basin.
It abounded with words like “serious”, “deteriorated”, “below average”, “severe problems”, and “low availability”. It painted a bleak picture of a system that was under extreme stress and which needed prioritisation of critical needs.
It also merited the perhaps over-worked rejoinder “no sh-t, Sherlock.” Thanks guys — even we city folks had noticed that the Murray-Darling is up sh-t creek. In fact, pretty much is a sh-t creek at the moment. And the communities living along the river have to live that reality every day.
The very last sentence at the end of the statement was illuminating. These joint statements have an interesting way of burying the bad news and dodges:
In managing the impacts of dry conditions, water trading markets should be used to the maximum extent possible.
What it should have read was “to the maximum extent that John Brumby will allow.” Which is 4%.
Oh, sorry, I forgot that there’s an “ambition” to move this to 6% in a couple of years. If John Brumby and the irrigators — who benefit financially from the water trading cap, which forces up water prices — allow it.
The sight of politicians issuing statements abounding with concern and recognition of the gravity of the environmental problems unfolding about us but then doing precisely nothing about it because it will upset industry or key constituencies is probably going to become a lot more common in coming decades.
Perhaps we should call this sort of statement a “murraydarling”, because it’s been going on longest there, for well over a decade. But in future we can probably expect our politicians to deplore the dearth of rain in south-eastern Australia, or the slow death of the Great Barrier Reef, with similar expressions of concern and commitments, couched in suitable bureaucratese, to immediately establish a plan to look at doing something.
Malcolm Turnbull kept up the attack on the Government’s Green Paper over the weekend — Brendan Nelson presumably having jumped on his bike and gone back on holiday. Turnbull’s comments come from pretty much the same mindset as that which evidently informed the Government while it was drafting the paper — this must be a scheme that doesn’t impose any pain on anyone. Turnbull labelled parts of the proposed scheme as “absurd” — quite correctly — but you get the impression his fix would be to make it even softer on industry.
Yes, it’s hard Malcolm — and Kevin and Penny and Wayne — for politicians to impose pain on the community or industry. We know that goes contrary to every fibre of your political being, and it’s easy for people like us who will never face an election in our lives to bag you for cowardice. But you can’t keep declaring in abstract that emissions trading must impose hardship, but then ensure each sector that complains gets looked after.
That is truly winning every battle and losing the war. This is already a scheme that will operate at 70% capacity — in fact, take another 15% for transport in the early years of the scheme. It will operate at just over half capacity until someone down the track, a leader with guts, gets us to 100% auctioning of permits.
Rudd told Greg Sheridan in an anodyne interview for the few pages of the Weekend Oz not given over to WYD propaganda that he wasn’t overly hopeful of an international climate change agreement any time soon. It doesn’t take too much pessimism, merely some downbeat realism, to suspect that humankind isn’t going to do anywhere near enough about climate change, especially if some of the gloomier projections turn out to be right.
Which, as Ross Garnaut has pointed out, is particularly bad news for Australia. The Green Paper talks airily about adaptation being one the pillars of the Government’s approach to climate change but there’s not much evidence it is taking that seriously. Apart from emissions trading, we need a national Plan B to help us adapt to a significantly hotter, drier continent.
This isn’t so much an environmental issue as a basic economic issue, because some of our fundamental production inputs will be changing significantly. The most significant of these will be water — we need to change the way we manage our water in order to…
Oh, hang on… that’s where I came in.
Maybe we should all move to New Zealand.
James and Kevin make interesting and valid observations about the approach of the current federal government to the environmental issues it made so much of prior to the last election. Rudd assured all that ,with the the election of Federal Labor, there would be a new spirit of co-operation between the States and Canberra and the “blame game” would end. Well it has ended and the Victorians remain just as intransigent as they were with Howard. Kevin says we should “pay people to reduce consumption”. That is exactly what I thought the solar panel rebate was meant to do and seemed to be doing successfully until Rudd/Wong/Tanner/Swan shafted the industry. Good reading on that topic is in the most recent edition of The Monthly by John Birmingham ( ‘The Same Dark Energy’ ) in which he describes in graphic detail the assurances given to the Solar Panel operators and how badly they were treated post election when Rudd had to make his “hard decisions”.
We see the same spin with the “Education Revolution” and Michael Costa,NSW treasurer, in his inimitable style, telling Canberra that this is no revolution if we ( NSW ) have to pay for the services needed to run these laptops.
What is happening with the hospital question and how they are to be managed? Again we were told the blame game” would end. To-day women booked to have their babies at a large suburban hospital in Western Sydney were told that they would have to go elsewhere because the safety of obstetric care could no longer be guaranteed. Nicola Roxon, where are you? Busy, no doubt conferring with her State labor colleague, the redoubtable , Reba ( ‘Grim Reba’ ) Meagher, trying to work out their next press release.
100% agreement!
I think it’s time the Commonwealth Govt. takes over the Basin. I understand that the Constitution reads that the States have control of the”reasonable use of water”
Using water to grow rice and cotton can not be regarded as “reasonable” in a hot ,dry, climate. I would hope that the highest court in the land would agree with me, if the move was challenged by the States. But of course the Senate vote may be a problem
It is clear that the trading schemes for water with the Murray Darling or for greenhouse emissions with the Emissions will never get operational and even if they did they will be emasculated.
There fortunately another way and that is the investment way. You pay people to reduce consumption but only if they spend the money on helping fix the problem. That is, give people some money if they sell their permits but they must spend the money on infrastructure to save water in the Murray Darling.
You pay people who consume less energy but you require them to spend their money on infrastructure to reduce emissions or to generate green energy.
Simple, effective and will not address the problem.
This is much better than the indirect trading approach which is too open to abuse. Getting people to invest means they will find the way that gives them the most profit and you can arrange it so that the more that is saved or generated the greater the benefit.
That John Brumby is holding the country to ransom is point I have made before. That is neither an original nor recent observation. It was made by Howard and Turnbull in 2006 and 2007. The obvious corollary of Rudd’s financially expensive lack of leadership and the resultant intra-Labor paralysis on this issue is remarkable for the almost deafening silence of the commentators who should be exposing it.
JamesK: everything in life is seminal. It doesn’t help the deeply worrying and catastrophic ‘Green Götterdämmerung’ for you to piously incant ‘I told you so’, nor does it matter whether or not a comment is being re-stated. With the average Australian clod you have to keep repeating something a thousand times to get past all the footy in their heads.
If you were to stretch your imagination instead of trying to tell other people how effing stupid they are you might come up with something worthwhile. Meanwhile, All of this so called pain the politicians feel, is, of course, just fear that no one will re-elect the bast*rds. This would be the perfect chance for Australian voters to force all governments into a two year term. On the second year, knowing they cannot be re-elected, the government in question might just have the ba*ls to do something positive. But how would anyone stop looking at the cricket……fill in the dots for all the other sports that addle people’s brains. What a futile exercise in hope!