The report into the Murray-Darling, and the near destruction thereof — remember that? The killing of our largest river system? So last week — made for interesting if scarifying reading. The rot may have started with the Howard years, and the corresponding accommodation of National Party demands, but it was really accelerated in the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison period.
The Nationals’ determination to gouge everything they could for northern agribusiness, and Abbott’s cracked belief that basic attention to nature as a complex system is somehow pagan, combined to create a pure disaster. This was the nihilism of capitalism and the right in its purest form. As one reads the detail of how a system put in place to guard an essential feature of life on this continent was gleefully subverted, undermined and trashed, one asks: how can I not have noticed this going on? We knew that the wrecking crew had taken power; why did we not pay more attention?
The proximate cause is obvious. By the time the Murray-Darling came under sustained attack, Fairfax had declined as an investigative source and News Corp was actively opposed to anything resembling critical environmental coverage. Four Corners does great work, but it’s one show, and other ABC outlets get even less attention. What was needed was a two-week, multi-part investigation, in the old Insight-style, to thoroughly anatomise the disaster, show the history of it, and name the names.
But there was a deeper reason why it didn’t occur to me, and many others, that the whole river system was being trashed, and that was, I think, a lot to do with coming of age during the Hawke-Keating years. This was when the Murray-Darling Basin Authority was created, both as an example of a new common-sense form of government, and as a symbol of a new type of federalism. The creation of the Murray-Darling authority and the participation of multiple parties was not only a recognition that the river system was essential to life, it was a recognition that the continent could no longer be managed via a states-led federal system which saw the Australian ecosystem as a free gift to commerce.
The creation of the system inaugurated 10 years of “water wars” in northern NSW and Queensland. There was good faith and bad faith on both sides, but ultimately what had to be defeated was the decades-long assumption of farmers that they had a right to as much water from the northern end of the system as their business needed. Once an agreement was reached, that seemed a set-and-forget sort of thing. Who would trash a whole river system?
We would, it turns out.
The tradeable rights that were built into the system became a series of mind-bending boondoggles and led to the perpetuation of forms of agriculture that should have been phased out for the general health of the system. The National Party has never needed an excuse to leverage the system, but the layers of water rights that got built onto the Murray-Darling system — the commodification of a common entity — did what it always does: utterly corrupted the management of it. The system dutifully coughed up 1 million dead fish, dying because the river was being killed.
Perhaps we should be perversely grateful for the Menindee fish die-offs, if that’s what it takes for the killing of the river to become visible. This event, and last week’s report should mark an end to the wanton trashing of the river system. But something more is needed than reform.
With the imminent change of government, barring disasters, what’s required is a renegotiation of relations between city and country in Australia. Due to political expediency, we are running an agricultural system based on a failed strategy concocted in the 1920s, when the population bias shifted decisively to the cities, and agribusiness began to replace mixed farming communities. That was the period of one bright idea after another. Rice and cotton, tobacco and God knows what, with scant regard for what specific regional systems could bear. The private farmer could do whatever they could get a permit for; the environmental impact was externalised.
That obviously can’t continue, and there is no economic need for it to do so. We need to reverse the emphasis from individual right and tradeable environmental rights, to ecosystem priority and hard limits on tangible use. That means that it should be mandatory for an environmental case to be made for any large-scale farming operation, with the virtual phasing out of whole operations and sectors over time.
Water and other rights should be specific allocations, tied to use and largely untradeable. Tens of millions of hectares should be taken out of production and rewilded, with family farmers fully compensated, and agribusiness partially compensated, and farmers re-hired as stewards and rangers of rewilded territory. Rewilding would restore rivers, and the wider ecosystems around them. The world will have to do this over the next century to avoid the collapse of the biosphere entirely — as this week’s story on the collapse of insect populations reveals (another story that will be gone by next week).
Labor should have a substantial majority come May — or, good God, in five weeks time. It has already announced it will lift the cap on water buybacks in the system. It should go further than that. It should roll out a tough policy on city-country relations; one that is based on structural change in what rural Australia is, does, and how it is managed. That should make a return to basic rational national management, abandoned in 1996 when two decades of right-wing political vandalism began.
That may hurt some farmers and communities that are doing their best within the current framework. But that can no longer stand in the way of real change; we can’t put yet more patches on a century-old strategy designed for a different continent. The greatest contribution Cubbie Station — that vast, anachronistic insanity — could make to the national interest now would be to blow up its dams, and let the waters flow. That, on a systemic level, is what the country needs now.
What do you make of this radical proposal? Write to boss@crikey.com.au with your full name and let us know.
A rational response to the bleeding obvious: that our ecosystem may well be on its deathbed. Which may be its greatest weakness, for we’ve seen how irrational so many players in this drama can be. There are two main problems. The first is the challenge it represents to the wealth and power of those in charge. The second is even more fundamental: the mindset that the continent is infinite that has prevailed since the start of European colonisation, and that it is our (whitefella) sacred duty to conquer and make productive. It’s an attitude that’s even embedded in our national anthem. “For those who come across the sea, we’ve boundless plains to share.” Except the plains aren’t boundless. They never were.
But good luck convincing the average Aussie of that.
Agree. We are still a settler society that is afraid of the bush and sees the country as a source of resources to be exploited rather than a natural environment whose health is essential to our survival and which deserves to be looked after for its own sake.
Also the plains were not shared by the invaders but fenced and parcelled out to the best connected and/or highest bidder.
And, far from being “golden soil” it was extremely fragile, its nutrient & humus content only available to be over exploited in 150yrs by careful management for the previous 50,000.
You conveniently overlook the ALP’s disastrous decisions and direct involvement in environmental degradation. Cubbie Station buyback, or at least the buyback of water rights could have certainly increased MD basin flow, the ALP government preferred a sale to the Chinese cotton industry.
Who is the motivating force behind the Gilbert River mega irrigation plans, QLD ALP ex treasurer De Lacy.
This article tells half the story by omitting the ALP involvement in allowing the agricultural environment, and unforgivably water resources of the second driest continent to be controlled by foreign companies and countries.
ALP & LIB/ NATs short sighted foreign ownership laws make such good economic sense, but are stupidity in reality. What sort of greedy fukwits allows the sale their countries water rights to foreign entities??
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Fair enough, but for political narrative purposes there will need to be some quid pro quo expected of the cities too, won’t there? Which likewise tie in to the life of the continent. Preservation of near-urban arable land? Sustainable population policy? A rural cousin of mine is always on about how high fuel prices are, when from a climate perspective they’re not nearly high enough. Would urban congestion charging moderate current prices and fuel use enough so that undense areas keep using private vehicles (since they’re more of a necessity out there) while lowering emissions overall?
Why would you punish the consumer? What do you expect them to do about it other than riot in the streets demanding your resignation and the abolition of your policy? If you want them out of cars you need to get them into something better.
This is a fantastic article, tender and generous but ‘tough love’ GR at his best, extending the hillbilly Oz scrub the great and rare city sophisticate’s courtesy of eschewing condescension and taking it seriously on its own urgent terms. I grew up on a mixed farmlet right on the Murray, PM Gorton boondoggle country, my old man and his hardscrabble pigshit stubborn circles (loved you dearly dad, but…) fought like buggery for handout scraps which in the early mid seventies became entrenched entitlement welfare piles. The shift to cotton and rice in our area went against every farmer’s gut instinct but, you know…progress/Asian markets/hard working battlers…new irrigation rights became heritage/way of life ID politics very quickly, so it became easy to slag off the same cautioning scientists who for a century had been natural allies (ploughs, rabbit plagues, crop strains…)…dad stood for the Nats three times and fine, Joyce may well be a total nob but my old man wasn’t, and most Nats aren’t…these communities are deeply, functionally socialist at core, and Thatcherite economics has fucked them more thoroughly than any other subsection of our patch. No question all are deeply complicit in the rise and rise of the scorched earth monster that is today’s neoliberal agribusiness, and the ‘noble Oz bushie’ myth was always as counterfeit as the ‘noble Oz union man’ city version. But without the generosity of heart so wonderfully extended in the tone and intent of this writing the bush will tend to recoil from any attempt by city smarties to make the future saner, if for no other reason than humiliated exasperation as always being made the butt of everyone’s cheap jokes. No one likes being forced to choose between supplication, citification, or the shotty.
So onya, writer. As usual, when it’s really serious.
Thankyou Jack for this. The people I know from the country, many fourth, fifth and sixth generation farmers do love the land as you point out, and the drift from working with the land to screwing the land has been driven by todays neo business agribusinesses.
The challenge is finding the strong voices in the bush, those farmers willing to speak out and make a stand. I know they are out there- (mostly down river from Cubbie?).
The Nationals stopped representing the real man and woman on the land years ago. Perhaps a grass roots political movement is needed as well. While we still have family farms. Before the corporate monsters devour them all. Just a few thoughts.
Yes, thanks, Jack.
Mainly for recalibrating that Them vs Us position on the environment. Lots of us stand on the shoulders of hardworking rural ancestors to be wiser about the environment nowadays.
In the cities the pop-think is that montane forests are the native ecosystem.
But why would open canopy forest be more important than black box woodlands or mulga rangelands of the Murray-Darling basin? Other grey nomads like me stay on stations rather than National Parks when exploring the Darling and Murrumbidgee – and you get a sense of the concerns of independent farmers in these regions.
I like Guys notion of wilding. Some landowners already look for income from carbon credits in revegetating some areas of the stations. Gundabooka and a few others have been bought back by NSW government to become new NPs.
I’d like to see ideas for changing the current shape of the Darling watercourse from open-drain to a more original morphology with snags and dams and overflows and billabongs to hold waters longer – and restoration of the eroded bare banks that must surely have been a beavers nest of fallen and log-jammed red gums before riverboat crews cut them for fuel. The navigability of this river should not be a big issue – just its function as a life-giving source of clean water.
anotherdirtroad I agree. The wide ranging and interesting commentary here has understandably drifted from the proposition Guy put. I am absolutely for re-wilding, an intelligent investment in the future. But I am not necessarily restricting re-wilding to lightly touched landscapes. A little enthusiasm in garden variety gardening can remarkably re-wild a little patch of suburban desert.