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WHEN former Labor leader Mark Latham was campaigning to win the 2004 federal election, he promised to add 450 gigalitres of environmental flows to the Murray River in his first term of government and an extra 1,500 within ten years.

Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown said he would return 1,500 gigalitres within five years – in half the time.

Back then 1,500 gigalitres seemed like a lot of water.

In a June 2003 interview for ABC Television’s Four Corners, the late Peter Cullen from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists also mentioned 1,500 gigalitres and indicated that volume was scientifically derived.

In their Blueprint for a National Water Plan, the Wentworth Group proposed the water be returned through an annual incremental increase of 100 gigalitres for environmental flow. Based on this 2003 plan, by last year at least 800 gigalitres would need to have been returned to the river.

In fact, when campaigning during the 2010 federal election Julia Gillard said over 900 gigalitres had already been recovered.

The Wentworth Group should be happy with progress.

But it isn’t.

The group now claims no less than 4,000 gigalitres must be returned to the Murray Darling river system. The Australian Greens are also now claiming that a minimum of 4,000 gigalitres must be returned to ensure the Murray River’s survival and 7,600 gigalitres if it is to be healthy.

What has precipitated such a momentous change in the volume of water required to save the river?

In 2003 the water was apparently needed because of declining water quality and rising river salinity. This was shown to be a furphy: river salinity levels had been falling since the early 1980s since implementation of the salinity management strategy of the Murray Darling Basin Commission.

So now less, not more, water should be needed. But the focus has switched to the bottom of the system with claims more water is now needed to keep the Murray’s mouth open.

Professor Cullen was talking about the Murray’s mouth in that June 2003 Four Corners interview. Had he mentioned the need for a minimum of 4,000 gigalitres back then it would have been considered greedy.

Not any more! Expectations have changed.

I put the change down to two initiatives lead by former prime minister John Howard. In 2007 the Water Act became law, creating priority for environmental water. In the same year $10 billion was allocated for implementation of the associated Murray-Darling Basin plan.

Thanks to Mr Howard, Ms Gillard now has a legal obligation to send a volume of water about equal to the total current baseline diversions for the NSW Murray (1,812/year GL) and also the Murrumbidgee (2501 GL/year) to South Australia every year.

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First published in The Land newspaper on January 19, 2012

THERE are a lot of comments in the thread following my blog post ‘Healthy Country Means Less Water for South Australia’. In that thread Peter R. Smith OAM has claimed that if it weren’t for the barrages Lake Alexandrina, a terminal coastal lake at the bottom of the Murray Darling catchment, would become hyper-saline. In the same thread Sean Murphy has replied, but Lake Alexandrina was once tidal, so how could it become hyper-saline?

It could become hyper-saline if the Murray’s sea mouth closed over completely, something that engineers warned in 1903 could happen if the barrages were built stopping inflows from the Southern Ocean – stopping the tide.

Soon after Europeans started farming on the shores of Lake Alexandrina they began devising plans to preventing it from becoming salty. The first such plan was presented to the South Australian parliament in 1890. Prepared by the Engineer in Chief Alex B. Moncrieff it proposed the building of a lock on the Goolwa channel and barrages across the other channels to prevent seawater from entering the lake.

Federation, and the 1895-1902 drought, focused the attention of the communities along the River Murray on the need for cooperation if they were to develop the waters of the River Murray. In 1902 the Corowa Water Conservation Conference led to an Interstate Royal Commission with the purposes of “To inquire and report on the conservation and distribution of the Murray and its tributaries for the purpose of irrigation, navigation and water supply.” It was another twelve years before the River Murray Waters Agreement 1915 was ratified which created water sharing principles for New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia including an annual water entitlement for South Australia to be met in equal share by Victoria and New South Wales, and the development of a program of major works including the construction of dams and weirs which the three states and the Commonwealth where to jointly fund.

In the meantime a more substantial plan was developed to prevent Lake Alexandrina becoming salty, as it had during the federation drought. The plan was presented to government in 1903 as a joint report by T.W. Keele the Principal Engineer of Harbors and Rivers of New South Wales, W. Davidson the Inspector-General of Public Works of Victoria and Mr Moncrieff who was still the Engineer in Chief in South Australia.

The report, dubbed, the “Report by Experts” begins with reference to why the best option for securing “the impounding of the fresh water” should involve the blocking of several channels from the lake that converge on the Murray’s sea mouth rather than placing a barrage across the actual sea mouth of the river. The report also explains why the barrages should be placed such that they exclude the Coorong from the Alexandrina lake system because the Coorong represented “an evaporating area of 90 square miles additional to that of the lakes”.

The report details and quantifies the tidal influence through each of the channels relative to a tidal gauge at Milang. The opening between Mundoo and Hindmarsh Islands is referred to as the most direct outlet from the lakes to the sea and with a tide that rises considerably higher than the tide through the Goolwa channel. Different barrage structure were proposed for each of the channels with a permanent earthen wall pithed with stone across Boundary Creek, while for the Goolwa it was proposed a sheet-pile structure be built with a lock large enough for river steamers.

The Report by Experts includes two important warning: that after construction of the barrages the Murray’s mouth would be expected to close over completely; and before erecting the barrages a more regular supply of fresh water from the river would first need to be secured or the lakes would dry-up during periods of drought. These important caveats have been subsequently ignored by state and commonwealth governments and are never referenced in the very many reports published with increasing regularity by the Murray Darling Basin Authority.

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Report by experts. The Murray Barrages. August 20, 1903. The Advertiser p. 8 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4987833

DAVID Wroe from The Sydney Morning Herald has written a well balanced article on the waste of money in buying Toorale (pronounced Too-rally) Station at Bourke: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/station-buyout-a-waste-of-money-20111223-1p8ln.html.

I attempted to leverage this with a letter to the Editor which failed to make the final cut:

Congratulations to the SMH (Station buyout a waste of money- 23rd December) for “outing” the Commonwealth and former NSW State Government for the total waste of $23.75m in purchasing Toorale Station. Not only was this a waste of taxpayer’s funds for negligible environmental benefit, it also took out of production the hard hit Bourke community’s most productive enterprise. How downstream grazier Justin Mc Clure can argue that a 0.01% increase in flow can generate downstream environmental benefits is a real mystery.

The episode has wider ramifications in terms of the Draft Murray Darling Basin Plan. The Commonwealth Water Act 2007 and the approach of the Murray Darling Basin Authority is deeply flawed and the Toorale outcomes represent a good example of the likely consequences-negligible environmental benefit, but significant negative economic consequences. When flows are low, license conditions prevent extractions and diversions, when flows are significant the impacts of extractions and diversions are minimal. Dorothea Mackellar was absolutely right in describing inland Australia as a land of “droughts and flooding rains”, she could have added and “not much in the middle.

In using absolute numbers as the MDBA has done, to prescribe acceptable extractions/diversions limits without gearing these to actual flows (availability) is really nonsense. To argue that these numbers are “averages” doesn’t help, given the enormous spreads around the averages. Our current water bureaucrats could do worse than studying how the existing control system operates. It works rather well.

J.D.O.(David) Boyd
St Ives NSW 2075
(Former Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture, the previous owner of Toorale Station)

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