Water, water everywhere... nor any drop to drink

Water, polls consistently show, is the key issue in the South Australian election. And it is important.

But there is a disturbing contradiction in public discourse on the issue and, I’m afraid, nobody (except perhaps for the Greens) seems to be talking sense realise that we as a state cannot have our cake and eat it, too.

The issue’s biggest champion, and also the most frequent self-contradictor: the Advertiser. Scroll through the Advertiser’s reporting on the issue and you’ll find that every emotive piece that trash-rag has written contains photographs or comments about one of two groups disadvantaged by the water crisis. The first are Riverland farmers. The second are people living on or around the Lower Lakes. Both want more water, but for different reasons.

Riverlanders cannot water their citrus trees and grapevines and, consequently, some of the crops are beginning to die. The issue for them is about irrigation rights; the right to use River Murray water for agriculture.

Lower Lakers are perturbed about the ecological impact that flooding the lakes with saltwater might have; whining all the time in blissful ignorance of the area’s estuarine history.

We’ve already run cap-in-hand to New South Wales and Queensland begging for more water. And we scowl at them for not sending greater flows down the River. And we scowl at Mike Rann and Karlene Maywald for not doing more. But water rights are, whether we like it or not, the constitutional domain of the states and states upstream will never be as cooperative as we might hope.

And why, I ask, should the eastern states accommodate our water needs if we’re simply going to hand it over to grape and orange farmers in Renmark and Berri? NSW and Queensland have farmers of their own to protect and, while the merit of the geographical location of our state borders is, in actuality, purely a reflection of the kinds of stupid, arbitrary determinations made about this land in a colonial era in which we did not respect its ecological fragility, states do and should protect the interests of their citizens.

But the environment, the land, and the birds, fish, animals and plants that depend on the River belong to all Australians.

So if we want environmental flows to restore the health of a dying, ailing ecosystem, then South Australia has a valid, moral point from which to argue its case. If we want to pipe even a tenth of that water into irrigation canals in the Riverland, forget it. It’s more logical, more sensible and more morally justifiable to have and use that water in states with a natural comparative advantage, rather than irrigate scrub and desert.