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special section: water and intergovernmental relations

Thirsty Australia

Dealing with drought that crosses state lines

By Asa Wahlquist

When outsiders think of Australia and water, they are likely to imagine the beaches and Great Barrier Reef of the east coast or the crocodile-infested swamps of the Northern Territory. But for most Australians, water has become increasingly scarce.

The Australian people and their governments are confronted today with the most severe water crisis in their history. Prolonged drought, exacerbated by climate change, has sparked water restrictions in every town and city in the southern part of the continent, where most of the population lives, and drastically reduced the supply of irrigation water.

Australians themselves are having difficulty adjusting to this dramatic new reality. Many have long loved to recite the words of the popular poem My Country by Dorothea Mackellar, which describes the “sunburnt country” as a land “of drought and flooding rains.” The poem, published in 1908, describes an Australia that is fast disappearing. Over the past decade, there has been extended drought and very few flooding rains.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent. It has the most variable rainfall and the lowest run-off of water into its rivers in the world.

The early exploration of Australia involved a constant search for fresh water. But the rivers the explorers found were quite unlike those of Europe. The rivers spread out across the flood plain in wet years and dried to chains of ponds in dry periods.

Rivers gush, then dry

How drastically a river changes can be measured by comparing its maximum flow to its minimum over the course of a year. The Amazon’s maximum is 1.3 times its minimum flow and the Yangtze is two to one. Australia’s most important river, the Murray, has a highly variable ratio of 15.5 to one, while its tributary, the Darling River, has an extraordinary ratio of 4,705 to one.

The Murray, despite its importance for Australia, is a comparatively modest river. As much water flows out the mouth of the Amazon in one day as flows out the Murray in one year.

But lately, the vital wetlands of the Murray River have been drying out. The old River Red Gum trees are dying, the populations of migratory water birds and native fish have plummeted and the lakes at the end of the system are dying.

The Murray-Darling basin, which covers an area the size of France and Germany combined, is Australia’s food basket. The basin is composed of the lands bordering the Murray River, the Darling River and all their tributaries and consists of most of the land in New South Wales and significant sections of Victoria, South Australia and Queensland – four of Australia’s six states – plus the Australian Capital Territory.

The country, which exports about 70 per cent of its agricultural production, is expected to earn A$30 billion (the equivalent of US$20.4 billion), or about 20 per cent of its export income, from the sector this year. Much of its agriculture is centred in this vast basin.

However, the basin is being rapidly depleted of its water, and the agricultural industry is reeling. About 23,000 of Australia’s 112,000 farmers, more than one-fifth, have received drought aid of about $1.6 billion US since 2002.
A decade ago, all the states agreed that too much water was being taken out of the river, but they could not agree on a plan to limit water use.

Control of water was a highly contested topic as long ago as the 1890s, when Australia’s Constitution was drafted, largely because of the importance of river transportation for trade and commerce. Section 98 of the Constitution extended the federal parliament’s jurisdiction over trade and commerce to the area of navigation and shipping. However, this was limited by Section 100 which states that the federal government “shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation.”

The Murray-Darling river basin has recently been the focus of one of the major controversies in Australian federalism in the past two decades because the basin falls under the jurisdiction of four state governments. Adding to this inter-state squabble was an awkward division of jurisdictions, with water controlled by the states and most drought relief funded by the federal government.

The government of former prime minister John Howard came close to reaching a deal on water with the states when Howard announced a National Plan for Water Security costing $6.7 billion US in 2006. The money was to be spent on upgrading inefficient irrigation systems and buying back water licences. A new authority, with increased powers, would manage the Murray-Darling Basin. The Howard government’s federal Water Act of 2007 used a range of federal government powers (such as external affairs, trade and commerce, corporations and territories) to enact legislation regulating water resources in Australia.

The Act was passed, but the plan was contingent on one condition: that the Murray-Darling states transfer all their powers over the basin’s water to the federal government. Victoria, Australia’s most urbanized state, held out, and a deal was not reached by the time the conservative Howard government was voted out of office in November 2007.

The new federal government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took on the controversy and hammered out a new deal with the states – including Victoria – in July, 2008 – but at a cost that will run into the billions of dollars. Rudd was able to work out the deal with the states because he had the advantage of being the leader of the Australian Labor Party, the party that also then held power in all six state legislatures.

State governments balk

In the talks, Rudd spoke of a new, more co-operative federalism. But Victoria state resisted the deal. It only agreed after Rudd promised $667 million US to help the state modernize its old and inefficient irrigation system.
The intergovernmental agreement, signed in July 2008, provides for setting up a new basin authority that will have the power to manage its waters. The agreement states that “governments commit to a new culture and practice of basin-wide management and planning, through new structures and partnerships.”

REUTERS/Mick Tsikas

A grains farmer stands over his failed wheat crop, near the town of West Wyalong. The farm was at the epicentre of a 2007 drought. The district normally grows much of the wheat which makes Australia the second biggest exporter in the world, but in 2007 it produced next to nothing. The only really good news in Australia’s agricultural sector is that farmers have not given up and sold their farms in the face of rapidly declining crop yields.

On Dec. 4, 2008, that agreement became law when the Australian Senate approved a new bill. The bill gave the federal government power over water in the Murray-Darling River Basin as it battled a crippling drought. (See Australia’s food basket now under federal control.)

Now that an intergovernmental deal has been struck, it will be a race against time for Australia to solve its water shortage issues in the face of a grim recent past. The country has become noticeably dryer in the last decade.

Hanging on in droughts

After 10 dry years, the Murray River is in critical condition, warns Wendy Craik, the head of the Murray Darling Commission.
The Murray is a metaphor for the plight of Australia’s water resources country wide.

As a result, the country’s agriculture sector has suffered a major blow. Between 2001-02 and 2007-08, milk production fell 19 per cent while grain crops were halved in the worst years, 2002, 2006 and 2007. In 2007-08, the cotton crop was the smallest since 1982, while the rice crop was the smallest in 60 years.

Against this backdrop of decreased farm production, total rural borrowing doubled between 2002 and 2007, with farm income falling to $3.3 billion US in 2007-08 from $8.1 billion US in 2001-02.

One of the few consolations for the agricultural sector is that despite the hard times, only a small proportion of Australian farmers have left the land. Historically, farmers hang on to their farms through drought periods, and then sell after it rains.

There have been severe droughts before. But Craik says: “Average rainfall no longer results in average inflow (of water runoff into streams and rivers).”
The role of the commission, now superseded by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, is to manage the Murray River and the Menindee Lakes system of the lower Darling River, and advise the minister’s office on matters related to use of the water, land and other environmental resources of the Murray-Darling Basin.

Runoff is a key factor in ecological systems. It is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “the amount of rainfall or melted snow that is carried off an area by streams and rivers.”

In the Murray basin, less than 10 per cent of the runoff reaches the basin, compared with an average 39 per cent in Europe and 52 per cent in North America, two continents where much higher levels of water runoff reach bodies of water before it is absorbed into the soil or evaporates. This indicates to what degree the Australian soil in this area is dry and thirsty, soaking up most of the water runoff before it can feed into streams and rivers.

This makes the Murray-Darling basin very vulnerable to the impact of rising temperatures, which increase evaporation. A one-degree rise in temperature in the basin causes a 15-per-cent reduction in river flow, or about 1,850 gigalitres less water in the river.

The last three years in the basin were the warmest on record, with 2007 the warmest yet at 1.1 degrees Celsius above average.
Over the last 10 years, inflow into the Murray and its southern tributaries has been severely reduced. Levels are lower than those forecast for 2030. This is the harsh impact of climate change.

“We expected we might have to deal with that in 50 years time, but we didn’t expect to have to deal with it right now,” Craik said.

The key question now is whether this change has come in time to save the Murray as the river is running on next to empty. There is barely enough water to supply the towns and cities, and none for the environment – undeveloped lands and parks – or for irrigation.

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Asa Wahlquist is the Rural Writer for The Australian. She is the author of Thirsty Country: Options for Australia.