Water and the promise of water licences have been a political football that too many politicians have kicked around, says JOHN CRAWFORD
THE front-page story in last week's edition of The Weekly Times is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Government mismanagement of the Murray Darling Basin.
The use of on-farm storage dams such as that depicted on the front page is a shocking reminder of how precious water is in our dry climate and how wasteful we are of it.
There are few more inefficient methods of storing water than in large shallow storage ponds and it is grossly irresponsible of the Queensland and NSW governments to allow them.
Too often our river systems have been used as political footballs.
In the 1980s and 1990s you knew that an election was on the way when NSW politicians started talking about expanding the number of licences along some rivers.
New irrigation licences have been promised as part of election campaigns for as long as we have had irrigation technology.
We have a property on the Yanco-Billabong Creek, where irrigators ignored the advice of hydrologists in the 1970s and agreed to convert their 16ha riparian licence into 160ha licences. They then converted those licences into 1000 megalitre licences in the 1980s.
The creek was completely over-allocated, the system didn't have that sort of capacity.
Similar stories of over-allocation exist across the basin.
High river licenses on the Darling, east and north of Bourke, were turned into ordinary licences prior to the 1994 NSW state election as part of another vote grab.
That whole process was driven by the National Party who wanted to catch votes.
Water licences and the promise of water licences became a political football that too many politicians engaged in.
It was the sucker punch that we fell for election after election.
There was NSW Premier Bob Carr in 1995 wafting about pronouncing that we should "use it or lose it" when it came to river and bore licences.
Landholders were almost blackmailed into utilising their riparian river licences.
Land was cleared of their natural vegetation and channels were constructed.
Within a matter of a few years, the very same NSW premier who advocated that use-it-or-lose-it policy, was suggesting heavy fines and possible jail terms for landholders who cleared natural herbage from their land.
The NSW Government wanted you to use your irrigation licence but did not want you to clear the land to prepare it for irrigation.
In many ways this is not only the story of irrigation in NSW in recent times but also the case in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
Over-commitment of water has been locked in and only in better than average rainfall years can we expect some sort of allocation.
We tend to forget that the characteristics of the catchment areas in Victoria, NSW and Queensland have changed considerably.
Conservation farming techniques, tree planting and population growth have locked up rainfall run-off at the top end of catchments.
During dry times farm dams in the catchments have been enlarged and the number has increased.
All of this has reduced the run-off to creeks and rivers.
Storing water in large shallow lakes at Menindee and Lake Victoria is wasteful and very inefficient.
However, it is our only method of stockpiling water for the lower end of the system and Adelaide.
We could minimise this waste by removing the man-made barrages (completed in 1941) at the end of the lower lakes and constructing a weir at Wellington with either irrigation water piped to the present licence holders or compensation paid for the loss of water.
The lower lakes would again be a mix of sea water and fresh water as they had been for thousands of years.
Perhaps we all tend to forget that the environment and climate are always changing and what was OK 20 years ago can be way out of order today.
John Crawford was NSW Farmers' Association president from 1992-1995. His family owns a grazing and irrigation property at Moulamein and he lives at Wallendbeen, near Cootamundra, NSW.
