AUSTRALIA
Water Pressure
March 2001 – 45’
Australia's well is running dry. The world's most arid continent is also the biggest user of water per head of population. Now all Australians must hear a wake-up call: unless we get smart with how we use water, and do it quickly, the nation's economic sustainability is under threat.
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Reporter: Chris Masters
Producer: Lin Buckfield
Research: Kate Wild
CHRIS MASTERS: Who owns the water?
MAN: That's a very good question.
I'm not sure I know how to answer that one.
ANOTHER MAN: That's a good question.
YET ANOTHER MAN: Depends on who you're talking to.
I mean, farmers in general, yeah, they believe that the water is owned by themselves as property owners.
They believe that water is a property right.
WOMAN: Who owns the water is part of our global system.
Nobody owns the water.
The first right to water, I'd have to say, was Nature.
And, then, what's left after Nature we can use for human consumption.
GRAEME SAMUEL, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COMPETITION COUNCIL: Every person that lives in this country needs a given amount of water to be able to live.
And unless we have that managed properly, we can't look at a growth in the Australian economy.
DR GRAHAM HARRIS, CHIEF, CSIRO LAND AND WATER: We're trying to run a first world economy in what you might call a third world environment.
CHRIS MASTERS: Tonight, a journey along the course of our most important public debate.
Australians are the world's biggest consumers of water.
We live in the world's driest continent.
The shock of change is not in the future, it's with us now.
GRAEME SAMUEL: It's now become an urgent issue.
It's not a generational issue, it's an issue that has to be dealt with right at the moment, in this generation.
CHRIS MASTERS: Since white settlement, Australians have been busy reshaping the land and the rivers, forcing a fragile country to bend to the vision of a new, green Europe.
We have harvested what was seen as surplus water without understanding there's no such thing.
LEITH BOULLY, CHAIR, COMMUNITY ADVISORY COMMITTEE MURRAY DARLING MINISTERIAL COUNCIL: That's been what's driven us to develop the outback, I guess, that attitude.
It is changing, because we are now seeing in our hip pocket the impact of taming the environment.
And, in fact, instead of benefiting and using the natural services that were there to protect the environment, we've destroyed them, and we're going to pay for them into the future.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD, NSW PARKS AND WILDLIFE: Australia really is from an ecological perspective, is a real boom or bust continent.
And a lot of that boom or bust is driven by what happens in our climate and then our river systems.
PROF.
PETER CULLEN: We haven't learnt to live with extremes in this country.
And every time we have an extreme, be it a drought or a flood, the farmers believe this is a special event that needs the taxpayers to compensate them.
I don't buy that.
That's what Australia is about.
CHRIS MASTERS: There's not much time left for us to understand our own country.
Australia is about to spend billions on undoing the past, on fixing salinity.
DR TOM HATTON, SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST CSIRO: So, originally, Ken, they would've farmed right down to the road here?
KEN WALLACE, DEPT CONSERVATION AND LAND MANAGEMENT, WA: Yes.
Part of this land is property we've brought back and then we did the revegetation along the side.
It always intrigues me how variable it is in saline areas.
It's hard to believe that up until the 1950s this was one beautiful lake with lush, living vegetation and trees and shrubs across most of the lake floor.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here's one tiny example of what we're up against.
Lake Taarblin in the Western Australian wheatbelt has been choked to death by rising salt.
KEN WALLACE: This is the result of increased salinial groundwater rising up under the floor of the lake and, probably, increasing salty flows of water into the lake as a result of clearing of trees and shrubs around the lake.
CHRIS MASTERS: Western Australia has our largest areas of dry land salinity.
Once, this ground was covered with deep-rooted trees.
The amount of sweat that went into clearing it is incalculable.
DR TOM HATTON: I honestly can't imagine it.
The early stuff would have been done by hand and with horses.
But they were clearing a million hectares a year even in my lifetime.
That's a lot of work.
(Laughs) And it established a lot of good farms.
It produced a lot of food for people.
CHRIS MASTERS: The clearing of deep-rooted trees caused the watertable to lift, mobilising ancient stores of salt, already abundant in this island continent.
The advance of the salt has sent communities like these into retreat.
In this corner of Western Australia, one-third of the landscape could be salinised.
Are we getting over the denial?
DR TOM HATTON :Certainly, the farming community is.
They really do know the score.
I think they're very well informed at all levels.
I think the people of the city of Perth have a little ways to go before they fully appreciate the implications to them.
CHRIS MASTERS: Whether they know it or not, the battle is already on.
Beyond the dead lake is another in a chain of what were once wetlands.
KEN WALLACE: Here, we're trying to divert the high-saline low-volume flows of water around the lake and away from the lake so that we can only let fresh water come into the lake across this way through here.
CHRIS MASTERS: Over $4.5 million is being spent to revive Lake Toolibin.
Eight pumps work at keeping the salt away from the tree roots to keep the lake alive and support the surrounding farmland.
But nobody says the rehabilitation program does more than buy time.
DR TOM HATTON: One can do back-of-the-envelope calculations and say perhaps if we had 2,000 or 200,000 or 2 million ground-water pumps across the wheatbelt, we would have the problem under control.
Those are big numbers.
CHRIS MASTERS: Nature's own pumps, the trees, were replanted in small numbers in an effort to save the land and continue to make a dollar.
AUDREY BIRD: What needs to happen is it needs to happen across the landscape.
And that's the difficult part for farmers.
How can we get that draw-down of watertable across the landscape and still get some monetary return from our land?
CHRIS MASTERS: That's the big question all along this journey which is itself a learning curve.
15 million hectares -- around two Tasmanias -- is threatened by salinity.
This new rural rust belt stretches across five States, significantly threatening Australia's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin.
Next stop, the mouth of the Murray, where the next crisis awaits.
TIM FISHER, AUSTRAILAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION: Well, within 20 years, on current trends, Adelaide's drinking water will be too salty to drink, on average, two days in every five.
CHRIS MASTERS: At Murray Bridge, a huge pipeline connects Adelaide to a good 50 per cent of its water supply that is already carrying too much salt.
The salt load is partly a result of bad irrigation practices upstream.
And when it comes to bad irrigation practices, you don't have to look far.
The dairy farmers at Murray Bridge still don't know how much water they use when they flood-irrigate their land to create this lush pasture.
ERIC STEWART: Well, I've been around most of the dairy districts in eastern Australia, and milking cows need feed 365 days of the year, and we can grow feed here 365 days a year.
CHRIS MASTERS: But water politics has caught up with Murray Bridge.
When they meter the water, ration it further, and price it accurately, a lot of operators will be shaken out.
As you'll see, this is the story of life all along the rivers.
DENNIS HICKS, CHAIR, IRRIGATION ADVISORY BOARD, LOWER MURRAY IRRIGATION GROUP: I guess the pressure is to have a sustainable dairy industry in this region, to make sure that we're here in 50 years time.
WAYNE MEYER, PROGRAMME LEADER, CSIRO LAND & WATER: It really isn't sustainable, certainly not in its current form.
And in a fairly modified form, even then, it's going to struggle.
CHRIS MASTERS: Beyond the question of what profit they extract from the water is the problem of what they put back.
After the paddocks are turned into paddies, all the waste -- the nutrients, the chemicals, the pollution -- is pumped back into the Murray.
PROF.
PETER CULLEN, CHIEF EXEC, CRC FRESH WATER ECOLOGY: In urban Australia, you're not allowed to chuck your rubbish over the back fence and have it impact on your neighbours.
And yet in agriculture, there is a belief that you should be able to chuck your salt, your nutrients and your pesticides into the river and let them just go downstream.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Lower Murray dairy industry is trying hard to buy time by rebuilding their 100-year-old system to achieve efficiencies.
MONIQUE AUCOTE, LOWER MURRAY IRRIGATION ACTION GROUP: It's been estimated that for the whole of the Lower Murray area, it will be about a $40 million project.
CHRIS MASTERS: Could you pay for that yourself?
MONIQUE AUCOTE: No, we've only got 120 irrigators here.
There would be a need for some sort of cost sharing to do that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Historically, how well has the irrigation industry paid its way?
GRAEME SAMUEL: Until recent times, not well at all.
Water has been treated as a free resource.
"It falls from the sky, therefore why should we pay for it?"
And we haven't really assessed what the real cost of maintaining our water infrastructure is and what the real cost of providing water is.
Now, that's actually changed in more recent times.
CHRIS MASTERS: It was not so long ago that government had the opposite view.
We were wasting water into the sea.
We needed to drought-proof the land.
Long after the Snowy Mountains Scheme was finished, there was continuing encouragement to clear the land and use, or lose, the water.
TIM FISHER: In a way, it's just been a total white elephant.
And the Commonwealth, NSW and Victoria, are just trying to salvage what they can now, I think, out of the Snowy scheme.
CHRIS MASTERS: Hasn't there been a gross benefit to Australia in the creation of a very prosperous food and fibre industry?
FRANCIS GREY, CONSULTANT ECONOMIST: The key word there is 'gross'.
And what we get here is that people actually don't do their economic analysis properly.
When you do the net analysis to work out how much profit was made from these industries, how much return on capital, then you are basically way behind.
BARRY STEGGALL, SWAN HILL MP (NATS): What amazed me about the Snowy scheme was that we spent all that effort and energy on the engineering and all the cleverness of the tunnels and the turbines and the electricity and we spent virtually no time or effort on how the water was going to be used.
CHRIS MASTERS: 20 years after we sent the waters west, we moved to put a hand on the tap.
Governments agreed to a cooperative management program.
A cap was imposed on extractions.
National competition policy was applied.
The water industry was given a year 2000 deadline after which it would pay for itself.
The deadline was later postponed.
If it had to pay for itself from the start, would it have proceeded?
FRANCIS GREY: No.
It wouldn't have proceeded.
And in fact, all of these projects have been underwritten by government and they're underwritten by government for one very good reason -- the private sector, when asked to put their money into these schemes, wouldn't do it because it doesn't make any money.
It's far too risky.
CHRIS MASTERS: For many regions along the rivers, the reforms arrived too late.
The land around Swan Hill and Kerang was once part of an ancient seabed, so salt was never far from the surface.
When we irrigated, we lifted and moved the salt.
Instead of greening the interior, we turned it white.
KEVIN INGLES: When I was first down in Kerang 40 years ago from the north-west Mallee, I asked one of my shearing mates why had that farmer put so much phosphate on his paddock.
And he looked at me and he said, "That's salt."
And I thought to myself, "Well, why the hell would he put salt on his land like that?"
Since then, I've learned a lot.
CHRIS MASTERS: They used to call this place the Kakadu of the south.
It's now referred to as Australia's salt capital.
It's like the Dead Sea.
It's just full of salt.
TIM FISHER: It is pretty salty, isn't it?
This a natural lake that's been deliberately destroyed for the sake of securing productivity of irrigation properties in the surrounding area.
CHRIS MASTERS: One section of the lake is being kept alive with a designated environmental flow.
TIM FISHER: There probably were millions of birds that used to breed here at one stage.
And now no longer.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is this a heartening or a disheartening sight?
TIM FISHER: Oh, it's a bit of both.
It's nice to know that we have something left alive in the Kerang lakes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Agriculture is also kept alive, and is even thriving, having withdrawn to the higher ground.
And irrigation is doing its best to live down a bad name.
Craig Burrell is a smart, young irrigator making good money by ensuring the water only reaches the roots of his carrot crop.
CRAIG BURRELL: We basically like to know what's happening underneath, down at that three foot, so we're not losing too much water.
So this is why we sort of hit quickly through summer.
Hit the ground quickly with the water and try not to saturate it.
CHRIS MASTERS: But there's a lot of land that can't be saved.
So how long has this land been basically unusable?
And a lot of farmers like Kevin Englis.
He used to flood irrigate barley in this field until a salt concentration approaching seawater killed it.
KEVIN INGLES: It's unviable country.
You cannot flood irrigate country like this.
CHRIS MASTERS: For Kevin himself, there was a soft landing.
One element of the water reform package allows for the trading of water entitlements.
So Kevin was able to sell most of his water, but keep his land.
KEVIN INGLES: Well, my son went to Melbourne, he got a good job down there.
He'll never come back with the social life, the financial life down there.
You can't have that on a farm.
I was an ageing man.
Too busy under flood irrigation, growing lucerne, and far too much work involved.
And then the ability to be able to sell your water became a reality.
Which I did -- I sold my water.
At a high price.
It couldn't have been a better thing to happen for me -- was to be able to sell my water.
CHRIS MASTERS: Kevin's water has gone across the hill to Brown Brothers who use it to grow wine grapes at a far better return per megalitre.
But for much of the rest of the land and the region, as with Kevin, there's retirement.
TIM FISHER: It's like flogging a dead horse, really.
You shouldn't be farming areas with leaky soils and high watertables.
It's just patently unsustainable and it's much cheaper in the long run to pack up shop.
CHRIS MASTERS: A little further up the catchment, the water equals wealth equation is more evident.
While a megalitre, an Olympic swimming pool of water, might return an old-fashioned pasture irrigator around $15, here in the Goulburn Valley they get thousands.
On a newly opened market, water is free to flow to more profitable industries.
The Varapodio farm has grown a large export business around stone fruit.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Well, the new system's got a lot of advantages because we save at least 30 per cent of the water and we're actually putting the water in the right spot along the tree line and we're just irrigating the trees and we're not wasting water out into the middle of the tree line.
CHRIS MASTERS: Where we're walking now.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Where we're walking now.
CHRIS MASTERS: By importing Israeli micro-jet irrigation technology, Santo Varapodio is one farmer who is managing to do more with less.
The move was made as much for the sake of saving the water as it was for the sake of saving the farm.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Well, the warning bell, especially on stone fruit, started to ring when we were losing a lot of trees by being waterlogged for the surface water that was lying, because the moment you have surface water lying on stone fruit trees, they don't last very long.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Varapodios have been able to buy up some of the less efficient farms around them.
There you can see the old sprinklers indiscriminately tossing water about alongside equally inefficient, open, leaking channels.
How typical is the smart irrigator?
WAYNE MEYER: Ah, it's certainly growing, and that's a good thing.
But in terms of the total area of irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin, for example, and in terms of the amount of water that's used, by far the most water and the most area is on pastures with surface irrigation.
CHRIS MASTERS: Which is very, very inefficient.
WAYNE MEYER: It is pretty inefficient in terms of what you get back for the water you put on.
CHRIS MASTERS: Irrigation and the fruit industry remain an economic saviour throughout the Goulburn Valley.
But here too, they are buying time.
On the Tatura Golf Course, salinity is wearing through the fairway.
At the Marukna cemetery, they are repairing crumbling gravestones.
All through the region and all across Australia, you can hear the beat of the pumps fighting to keep the economy breathing above a reaching watertable.
There are problems, too, of discharge.
The Goulburn River is a large deliverer of phosphorous that precipitates blue-green algae.
It doesn't matter where you go, getting the right balance of removing clear profit and returning clean water is perplexing.
And the pressure does not ease when you cross the Murray into NSW.
GEORGE WARNE, CEO, MURRAY IRRIGATION LIMITED: Certainly we feel it through the community via the media and government and our irrigators are becoming increasingly nervous about what is a fair share of the water of the Murray for them.
And for their farm businesses and obviously for the dependent communities.
So the pressure's on.
CHRIS MASTERS: A private company, Murray Irrigation, pulls more water than the entire allocation for South Australia.
Murray Irrigation is also a big example of one of the biggest reforms.
In 1995, around 1,600 local irrigators assumed ownership of these antiquated supply systems when the old public scheme was privatised.
FRANCIS GREY: If you call a privatisation process where you take an asset which is a disaster in terms of economic performance and give it away to the people who use it in the hope that they'll take it on, I guess that's privatisation.
But it's not privatisation in the sense that we sell it off and we make lots of money out of it, like Telstra.
So in that sense, it's been a success.
GRAEME SAMUEL: We would expect that full cost recovery will be in place in the very, very near future.
That's meant some substantial changes because it has meant, in some areas, that those on the land particularly are paying more for their water than they were paying in the past.
But on the other hand, they now have a tradable water right which is ensuring that water is now being used more productively, more efficiently, and it's actually encouraging those who are on the land to move to far more productive and efficient irrigation processes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here in NSW, they are also pumping for their lives.
Murray Irrigation was set environmental objectives to bring the watertable down and reduce the amount of salt being released into the Murray.
KARL MATHERS, MANAGER, SUB SURFACE DRAINAGE, MURRAY IRRIGATION LTD: So, that's maintained the watertable at about 3m across this area, so below the root zone and keeping with the scheme's objectives.
CHRIS MASTERS: In one year, 240,000 tonnes of salt was locked up, reducing input into the Murray, improving health and fortune downstream.
They believe 60,000 hectares of their own land gets a direct benefit -- about 1/13th of the total area.
GEORGE WARNE: Yes, but it was the area most at risk and it's also an area that's crisscrossed with a riverine plain.
So there's been enormous spin-off benefits for health of the rivers -- the Niemur and the Wakool River, which run into the Murray.
And in turn, there's been a huge benefit, I believe, for the people who live downstream.
CHRIS MASTERS: And what's the ultimate objective?
Do you want to cart this away?
GEORGE WARNE: Yeah -- I think the farmers here would like to see salt leaving in truck-loads, 'cause there's a perception then that what you're doing is sustainable.
CHRIS MASTERS: But it costs at least a dollar a tonne to lock up the salt and, so far, they've not found too many buyers.
What is hardest of all is managing the change to sustainability when survival is already a battle.
How marginal is farming?
GORDON SPENCE: Well, there hasn't been nothing in it with the wool crash and the costs for over the last four or five years.
We're not making a profit and our costs, our workers comp and all, are really killing us.
CHRIS MASTERS: Reduced access to water has meant Gordon Spence has scaled back his farming.
GORDON SPENCE: Why cut us back to 78 per cent when the Murray River is running to waste and the water's running out the bottom of South Australia?
CHRIS MASTERS: So, do you think the bureaucrats and politicians actually do know what's best when it comes to water management?
GORDON SPENCE: Well, I often wonder whether they know which way the Murray runs, some of them!
CHRIS MASTERS: From the Southern Riverina, we move north towards the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, and the further north you go, the harder this seems to get.
The big crop around here is rice, and you need an inland sea of it to get a crop.
TIM FISHER: That's an area which, I think, suffers from leaky soils and inappropriate irrigation practices.
Some of the areas in the Coleambally district are just not appropriate for irrigated rice.
But I think that's one area which may be in denial about the impacts that they're having.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally was inspired and created by government.
In 1968, the Murrumbidgee was joined to the Snowy scheme, and after the civil engineering came the social engineering.
People were encouraged to come here and bid for a block.
DAVID TAYLOR: It's a well-known fact that we shouldn't have irrigated this country in the first place.
David and Gillian Taylor have a Merino property right next-door to the Coleambally scheme.
So, David, why did you dig the hole in the first place?
DAVID TAYLOR: Well, it was very hard to find information on what was happening under the ground and I guess it's an area which we're all guessing at the moment.
And we wanted to see what was happening.
GILLIAN TAYLOR: You can see the salt in the ground.
You can see the water -- it's putrid.
It's like a cancer.
Actually, I don't stay here very often.
I just bring people here, look at it, and go.
CHRIS MASTERS: Despite their problem with the watertable, the Taylors are beyond picking a fight with their neighbours.
At Coleambally, the battle to change and survive belongs to everyone.
DAVID TAYLOR: Our past is not all that great -- the way that we've run our country.
I think that, you know, that the dry-land sheep farmer had as much or more to answer for for the actual degradation of our lands.
And so we have to change.
LEITH BOULLY: I think that's where we need to move towards and, of course, that challenges the very notion of democracy in this country where rugged individualism is important and valued, becoming wealthy is important and valued, and working together is sometimes seen as a bit soft and perhaps, um --
CHRIS MASTERS: Un-Australian.
LEITH BOULLY: ..un-Australian -- yes!
CHRIS MASTERS: So, we've got a long way to go?
LEITH BOULLY: Yes, despite this notion of mateship and the myth of communities pulling together, it's very difficult for communities to do that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Thinking beyond your own boundary has been easier at Coleambally because everyone shares the challenge.
JOHN LAURIE: Back in '92, '93, we realised we had problems in the area, so, through salt action, we had this well installed.
And at the time of installation, the watertable level in this area was to within eight inches, 20cm, of the surface.
And I was wondering why crops were going backwards and I couldn't get machinery on country and so it went on and on and on.
CHRIS MASTERS: John Laurie describes himself as a reformed gung-ho irrigator.
John has planted lucerne alongside the rice and soya beans as one of a suite of measures to attack the watertable.
JOHN LAURIE: We're not irrigating the lucerne.
We're using it as a pump.
And as a result of that, we're seeing this flag gradually drop in the hole.
And our aim is to get it into this green area here, where we know that that watertable is where we want it and we can quite comfortably irrigate our country.
CHRIS MASTERS: Crop substitution is another hope.
Finding a crop that better suits the soil, is less greedy for water, and still makes a dollar, is why Tom Graham has assigned his best paddock to a hardwood plantation.
TOM GRAHAM: I can't believe myself, really, that these trees look like they are now after slightly over three years.
I wouldn't have believed it myself.
Now, when you add in the fact that I'm using only 1/4 of the water that I am on my rice crop, for example, well, nothing makes me feel better than that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Across Coleambally, a re-education program is under way.
MAN IN CLASSROOM: OK, we've got irrigation and rainfall coming in.
How much of that is going back into the atmosphere or running away through transpiration, evaporation and run-off?
CHRIS MASTERS: 30 years after the irrigation scheme went in, farmers are trying to understand what is happening underground.
MAN IN CLASSROOM: So going back to our diagram again, we want to keep the watertable down below two metres, where it can't affect the health of our crops.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally Irrigation -- another privatised irrigation company owned by the farmers -- is paying to send its people back to school.
RODNEY FOSTER: I went to a few meetings.
At the start, I was a bit back --
I wasn't backwards, but I was --
I was a bit, you know, "I'm not going to do that," and, "They can't make me do that."
But I went to a couple of classes and they're a lot more flexible than when they were a government-run department.
CHRIS MASTERS: 30 years after people were encouraged to believe there was limitless inexpensive water, the rules have changed.
And this is not about rice and farms.
It is about people and a town with shops, schools and cricket team.
MARGARET BURGE: We can cope with whatever financial decisions we have to make, but we cannot cope with policy changes that come with the slash of a pen.
CHRIS MASTERS: What sympathy do you have for those communities who were led down the road of putting in these irrigation schemes but told to cut down the trees and use as much water as they possibly could, Um, now being told by a new administration that they've done the wrong thing.
GRAEME SAMUEL: Oh, a lot of sympathy.
But sympathy's not enough.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally is one of a thousand rural communities that know this only too well, and see Graeme Samuel as yet another grim reaper from the city.
Like the other communities, Coleambally will fight for its life.
The big question being asked is, if they lose, who pays?
GRAEME SAMUEL: I sometimes hear politicians talk about the fact that they're now listening to their electors, and I see 'listening' as a code word for doing nothing.
What's terribly important now, I think, is the Government's realised you can't suddenly introduce new processes, new rules, new regulations, and new water management policies overnight -- and expect communities to adjust when they have been living for years, sometimes decades, under processes and rules and regulations which are entirely contradictory to those now being put in place.
There's an adjustment process of education and there's an adjustment process that requires financial advice, financial assistance, and advice and counselling in a very, very wide range of matters.
CHRIS MASTERS: As you travel further north, you see from the air what we often miss on the ground.
The further you go, the more you think of those extinct landscapes in the west and the south, and wonder why it's happening all over again.
In the late '90s, New South Wales was clearing land at the rate of about 30,000 hectares a year.
New South Wales is by far the biggest user of water in the basin and is still straining to keep below the cap agreed to in 1995.
LEITH BOULLY: 10 years ago, the lessons from the south were starting to emerge.
People in the north weren't looking south because they felt their system was different.
And I think one of the things we learn is we don't learn from other people's mistakes.
You have to suffer it yourself quite often before you learn.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I'm disappointed that the regulatory arrangements in those areas' jurisdictions has been so weak, and they don't start to really address those issues until it's too late.
We should be avoiding these mistakes, not continuing to remake them.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD, NSW PARKS AND WILDLIFE: You know a lot of the people who have lived for a long time on a river, in essence, they're in deep sorrow.
Actually, sort of regretting, you know, the path that we've taken for that river system -- 'cause it's actually very difficult to turn back.
CHRIS MASTERS: There are now laws to protect remaining wetlands -- laws that speak for the birds, the biodiversity and the future.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD: There's no greater sight than seeing one of these river systems in full flood with water birds breeding in their absolute thousands.
And fish species, you know, running across roads sometimes.
And frogs come out of their cocoons.
So, it is an amazing sight.
CHRIS MASTERS: Following heavy summer rain, the Narran Lakes, in the north of the State, are putting on a show.
But according to Richard Kingsford, the burst of life is a prelude to the same slow death we've seen in the south and the west.
Then, what are some examples we can see of the impact of that tap being turned off?
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD: Well, ultimately, probably over the next 50 to 100 years, you will be able to go out into the periphery of this wetland, where there are red gums like the ones that we see here, and some of the lignum here, will start to die.
If you said to the Australian community, we have a national park on the east coast and we're going to log 70 per cent of it, or we're going to mine 70 per cent of it, imagine the sort of reaction that would occur.
But, in essence, that's what's happened.
We've had 70 per cent of the water taken out of that system, and really there hasn't been that much debate in the general community.
CHRIS MASTERS: Much of the water being lost to the Narran Lakes is going to cotton farms north on the Balonne in Queensland.
Queensland is the only State in the basin not to have completely signed off on the cap.
DON BLACKMORE, CEO, MURRAY DARLING BASIN COMMITTEE: I think you've got to say it's disappointing.
In fact, you can use stronger words than that -- that they haven't had the ability to finalise a cap.
But, quite frankly, they are part of the basin, and at the end of the day, you know, you're in the boat, you row with the rest of the team.
CHRIS MASTERS: Much of the development is new, and it is still going in.
Queensland has been knocking down trees faster than anyone, but Queensland makes the case that within the basin, it's a small user of water.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: Oh, that's true -- they haven't developed their resource to the extent that NSW have, and they're not overdeveloped.
They've been rapidly developing, and one would like to think that instead of seeing NSW, which everyone accepts is overdeveloped, as a benchmark to aim for, they would be trying to learn from those mistakes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Queensland points out it has nothing like the salination problems evident in the south.
DR GRAHAM HARRIS, CHIEF, CSIRO LAND AND WATER: Salt will get you in the end, and there is absolutely nothing to say that salinity is a problem which stops at the NSW border.
CHRIS MASTERS: The further north you go, the more you question the political courage and competence to reconcile the competition for water.
Cubbie Station is Australia's largest private farm.
The access channel is bigger than the Culgoa River that feeds it.
Cubbie has enough water capacity to just about fill Sydney Harbour.
One of the engineers who helped build it, Bill Wuth, took us on a tour.
That's flood plain there.
BILL WUTH: That's flood plain there.
CHRIS MASTERS: Cleverly graded to gravity-feed the water, the farm practically runs itself.
In this year, they'll gross $60 million from the cotton.
BILL WUTH: Water here is collected and dispensed by the enterprise itself.
The infrastructure hasn't been paid for by government, it's been paid for by private enterprise.
And that's the cost -- it's not free.
Never has been.
CHRIS MASTERS: Cubbie pays the government an administration fee of $3,800 a year for those hundreds of thousands of Olympic swimming pools of water.
Across a few hills at St George, it's very different.
RAY KIDD: This water, as it comes through the waterwheels here, will be costing us about $28 a megalitre.
CHRIS MASTERS: And how secure is your right to the water?
RAY KIDD: Well, nowhere near as secure as we were hoping it would have been.
CHRIS MASTERS: The irrigators north of Cubbie are supplied by a public storage -- the Beardmore Dam.
Queensland, like NSW, has a sorry history of promising more water than heaven can deliver.
The Queensland Government has capped further development but, at some stage, the Government will have to go back on those promises.
And the threat of the withdrawal of what is seen as a right is turning irrigator against irrigator.
MAN: We now have a situation where different irrigators think they own the same water.
SCOTT ARMSTRONG: The Government's spending millions and millions promoting water use efficiency, but their own departments are operated -- you know, they operate the schemes in such a way that -- just appalling levels of efficiency and evaporation.
DON BLACKMORE: I think what you see, not only in Queensland but in other areas, is some perverse and unexpected outcomes of particular policies.
One of them was you didn't have to get a permit if your dam was less than five metres high.
Well, by any yardstick, that's been a dumb policy.
CHRIS MASTERS: So, if we are still making such fundamental blunders, how can we be sure we know how to properly spend the Howard Government-initiated salinity package billions?
LEITH BOULLY: No, quite often we don't know how to spend that money, and there's a few principles that we need to use.
A -- we have to have the knowledge and the data about the natural resources to ensure that we are addressing the cause of the problem, not the symptoms of it.
And we need to be very careful that we're being strategic, and putting money to the things that will make a big difference, not a small difference.
CHRIS MASTERS: Meanwhile, the frenzy of pumping to exploit the land in the north continues to the accompaniment of the beat of pumps all across Australia to buy time and save the land.
A preference for engineering solutions over more scientific research gives rise to concern that it will be used to prop up unsustainable industry, throwing good money after bad.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I would have liked to think that some of those people would by now have learnt that ignorance hasn't been a very good guide for action in the past.
And it's that sort of mentality -- of let the bulldozers rip -- that has created the current problems.
And as a scientist I'd like to think that we were smarter than that and can learn from our mistakes, and that we do try to base our investments, and they're community investments, on the basis of reasonable knowledge rather than a hunch.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here in the bush, where communities ARE actively engaged in the struggle to better manage water, there is exasperation at what little is known of reforms that affect all Australians.
We all get the bill that funds the changes, be it paying compensation for dispossessed farmers, the real cost of food, and the final bill for fixing a broken land.
GILLIAN TAYLOR: We're all addressing change in some way.
People in suburbia, like Australia as a suburban-type community, we've lost our contact with our land, and our understanding of where our basic commodities come from.
So I don't think it's only the rural people that have to accept change -- it's the whole community.
CHRIS MASTERS: Australia will be a very different country if we manage the changes.
The agricultural face of Australia will be different.
And if we don't change, you don't have to look far to see what we're in for.
TIM FISHER: As a nation, I think we've got a literacy problem.
We don't know how to read our landscape.
I think in many ways we still see it through European eyes, by and large.
And we need to understand our landscape a lot better.
Unless we start to understand the values and significance of our rivers and waterways, then we really can't hope to know what to do, or even why we should do it.
So it's a big challenge ahead.
Water Pressure
March 2001 – 45’
Australia's well is running dry. The world's most arid continent is also the biggest user of water per head of population. Now all Australians must hear a wake-up call: unless we get smart with how we use water, and do it quickly, the nation's economic sustainability is under threat.
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Reporter: Chris Masters
Producer: Lin Buckfield
Research: Kate Wild
CHRIS MASTERS: Who owns the water?
MAN: That's a very good question.
I'm not sure I know how to answer that one.
ANOTHER MAN: That's a good question.
YET ANOTHER MAN: Depends on who you're talking to.
I mean, farmers in general, yeah, they believe that the water is owned by themselves as property owners.
They believe that water is a property right.
WOMAN: Who owns the water is part of our global system.
Nobody owns the water.
The first right to water, I'd have to say, was Nature.
And, then, what's left after Nature we can use for human consumption.
GRAEME SAMUEL, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COMPETITION COUNCIL: Every person that lives in this country needs a given amount of water to be able to live.
And unless we have that managed properly, we can't look at a growth in the Australian economy.
DR GRAHAM HARRIS, CHIEF, CSIRO LAND AND WATER: We're trying to run a first world economy in what you might call a third world environment.
CHRIS MASTERS: Tonight, a journey along the course of our most important public debate.
Australians are the world's biggest consumers of water.
We live in the world's driest continent.
The shock of change is not in the future, it's with us now.
GRAEME SAMUEL: It's now become an urgent issue.
It's not a generational issue, it's an issue that has to be dealt with right at the moment, in this generation.
CHRIS MASTERS: Since white settlement, Australians have been busy reshaping the land and the rivers, forcing a fragile country to bend to the vision of a new, green Europe.
We have harvested what was seen as surplus water without understanding there's no such thing.
LEITH BOULLY, CHAIR, COMMUNITY ADVISORY COMMITTEE MURRAY DARLING MINISTERIAL COUNCIL: That's been what's driven us to develop the outback, I guess, that attitude.
It is changing, because we are now seeing in our hip pocket the impact of taming the environment.
And, in fact, instead of benefiting and using the natural services that were there to protect the environment, we've destroyed them, and we're going to pay for them into the future.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD, NSW PARKS AND WILDLIFE: Australia really is from an ecological perspective, is a real boom or bust continent.
And a lot of that boom or bust is driven by what happens in our climate and then our river systems.
PROF.
PETER CULLEN: We haven't learnt to live with extremes in this country.
And every time we have an extreme, be it a drought or a flood, the farmers believe this is a special event that needs the taxpayers to compensate them.
I don't buy that.
That's what Australia is about.
CHRIS MASTERS: There's not much time left for us to understand our own country.
Australia is about to spend billions on undoing the past, on fixing salinity.
DR TOM HATTON, SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST CSIRO: So, originally, Ken, they would've farmed right down to the road here?
KEN WALLACE, DEPT CONSERVATION AND LAND MANAGEMENT, WA: Yes.
Part of this land is property we've brought back and then we did the revegetation along the side.
It always intrigues me how variable it is in saline areas.
It's hard to believe that up until the 1950s this was one beautiful lake with lush, living vegetation and trees and shrubs across most of the lake floor.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here's one tiny example of what we're up against.
Lake Taarblin in the Western Australian wheatbelt has been choked to death by rising salt.
KEN WALLACE: This is the result of increased salinial groundwater rising up under the floor of the lake and, probably, increasing salty flows of water into the lake as a result of clearing of trees and shrubs around the lake.
CHRIS MASTERS: Western Australia has our largest areas of dry land salinity.
Once, this ground was covered with deep-rooted trees.
The amount of sweat that went into clearing it is incalculable.
DR TOM HATTON: I honestly can't imagine it.
The early stuff would have been done by hand and with horses.
But they were clearing a million hectares a year even in my lifetime.
That's a lot of work.
(Laughs) And it established a lot of good farms.
It produced a lot of food for people.
CHRIS MASTERS: The clearing of deep-rooted trees caused the watertable to lift, mobilising ancient stores of salt, already abundant in this island continent.
The advance of the salt has sent communities like these into retreat.
In this corner of Western Australia, one-third of the landscape could be salinised.
Are we getting over the denial?
DR TOM HATTON :Certainly, the farming community is.
They really do know the score.
I think they're very well informed at all levels.
I think the people of the city of Perth have a little ways to go before they fully appreciate the implications to them.
CHRIS MASTERS: Whether they know it or not, the battle is already on.
Beyond the dead lake is another in a chain of what were once wetlands.
KEN WALLACE: Here, we're trying to divert the high-saline low-volume flows of water around the lake and away from the lake so that we can only let fresh water come into the lake across this way through here.
CHRIS MASTERS: Over $4.5 million is being spent to revive Lake Toolibin.
Eight pumps work at keeping the salt away from the tree roots to keep the lake alive and support the surrounding farmland.
But nobody says the rehabilitation program does more than buy time.
DR TOM HATTON: One can do back-of-the-envelope calculations and say perhaps if we had 2,000 or 200,000 or 2 million ground-water pumps across the wheatbelt, we would have the problem under control.
Those are big numbers.
CHRIS MASTERS: Nature's own pumps, the trees, were replanted in small numbers in an effort to save the land and continue to make a dollar.
AUDREY BIRD: What needs to happen is it needs to happen across the landscape.
And that's the difficult part for farmers.
How can we get that draw-down of watertable across the landscape and still get some monetary return from our land?
CHRIS MASTERS: That's the big question all along this journey which is itself a learning curve.
15 million hectares -- around two Tasmanias -- is threatened by salinity.
This new rural rust belt stretches across five States, significantly threatening Australia's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin.
Next stop, the mouth of the Murray, where the next crisis awaits.
TIM FISHER, AUSTRAILAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION: Well, within 20 years, on current trends, Adelaide's drinking water will be too salty to drink, on average, two days in every five.
CHRIS MASTERS: At Murray Bridge, a huge pipeline connects Adelaide to a good 50 per cent of its water supply that is already carrying too much salt.
The salt load is partly a result of bad irrigation practices upstream.
And when it comes to bad irrigation practices, you don't have to look far.
The dairy farmers at Murray Bridge still don't know how much water they use when they flood-irrigate their land to create this lush pasture.
ERIC STEWART: Well, I've been around most of the dairy districts in eastern Australia, and milking cows need feed 365 days of the year, and we can grow feed here 365 days a year.
CHRIS MASTERS: But water politics has caught up with Murray Bridge.
When they meter the water, ration it further, and price it accurately, a lot of operators will be shaken out.
As you'll see, this is the story of life all along the rivers.
DENNIS HICKS, CHAIR, IRRIGATION ADVISORY BOARD, LOWER MURRAY IRRIGATION GROUP: I guess the pressure is to have a sustainable dairy industry in this region, to make sure that we're here in 50 years time.
WAYNE MEYER, PROGRAMME LEADER, CSIRO LAND & WATER: It really isn't sustainable, certainly not in its current form.
And in a fairly modified form, even then, it's going to struggle.
CHRIS MASTERS: Beyond the question of what profit they extract from the water is the problem of what they put back.
After the paddocks are turned into paddies, all the waste -- the nutrients, the chemicals, the pollution -- is pumped back into the Murray.
PROF.
PETER CULLEN, CHIEF EXEC, CRC FRESH WATER ECOLOGY: In urban Australia, you're not allowed to chuck your rubbish over the back fence and have it impact on your neighbours.
And yet in agriculture, there is a belief that you should be able to chuck your salt, your nutrients and your pesticides into the river and let them just go downstream.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Lower Murray dairy industry is trying hard to buy time by rebuilding their 100-year-old system to achieve efficiencies.
MONIQUE AUCOTE, LOWER MURRAY IRRIGATION ACTION GROUP: It's been estimated that for the whole of the Lower Murray area, it will be about a $40 million project.
CHRIS MASTERS: Could you pay for that yourself?
MONIQUE AUCOTE: No, we've only got 120 irrigators here.
There would be a need for some sort of cost sharing to do that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Historically, how well has the irrigation industry paid its way?
GRAEME SAMUEL: Until recent times, not well at all.
Water has been treated as a free resource.
"It falls from the sky, therefore why should we pay for it?"
And we haven't really assessed what the real cost of maintaining our water infrastructure is and what the real cost of providing water is.
Now, that's actually changed in more recent times.
CHRIS MASTERS: It was not so long ago that government had the opposite view.
We were wasting water into the sea.
We needed to drought-proof the land.
Long after the Snowy Mountains Scheme was finished, there was continuing encouragement to clear the land and use, or lose, the water.
TIM FISHER: In a way, it's just been a total white elephant.
And the Commonwealth, NSW and Victoria, are just trying to salvage what they can now, I think, out of the Snowy scheme.
CHRIS MASTERS: Hasn't there been a gross benefit to Australia in the creation of a very prosperous food and fibre industry?
FRANCIS GREY, CONSULTANT ECONOMIST: The key word there is 'gross'.
And what we get here is that people actually don't do their economic analysis properly.
When you do the net analysis to work out how much profit was made from these industries, how much return on capital, then you are basically way behind.
BARRY STEGGALL, SWAN HILL MP (NATS): What amazed me about the Snowy scheme was that we spent all that effort and energy on the engineering and all the cleverness of the tunnels and the turbines and the electricity and we spent virtually no time or effort on how the water was going to be used.
CHRIS MASTERS: 20 years after we sent the waters west, we moved to put a hand on the tap.
Governments agreed to a cooperative management program.
A cap was imposed on extractions.
National competition policy was applied.
The water industry was given a year 2000 deadline after which it would pay for itself.
The deadline was later postponed.
If it had to pay for itself from the start, would it have proceeded?
FRANCIS GREY: No.
It wouldn't have proceeded.
And in fact, all of these projects have been underwritten by government and they're underwritten by government for one very good reason -- the private sector, when asked to put their money into these schemes, wouldn't do it because it doesn't make any money.
It's far too risky.
CHRIS MASTERS: For many regions along the rivers, the reforms arrived too late.
The land around Swan Hill and Kerang was once part of an ancient seabed, so salt was never far from the surface.
When we irrigated, we lifted and moved the salt.
Instead of greening the interior, we turned it white.
KEVIN INGLES: When I was first down in Kerang 40 years ago from the north-west Mallee, I asked one of my shearing mates why had that farmer put so much phosphate on his paddock.
And he looked at me and he said, "That's salt."
And I thought to myself, "Well, why the hell would he put salt on his land like that?"
Since then, I've learned a lot.
CHRIS MASTERS: They used to call this place the Kakadu of the south.
It's now referred to as Australia's salt capital.
It's like the Dead Sea.
It's just full of salt.
TIM FISHER: It is pretty salty, isn't it?
This a natural lake that's been deliberately destroyed for the sake of securing productivity of irrigation properties in the surrounding area.
CHRIS MASTERS: One section of the lake is being kept alive with a designated environmental flow.
TIM FISHER: There probably were millions of birds that used to breed here at one stage.
And now no longer.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is this a heartening or a disheartening sight?
TIM FISHER: Oh, it's a bit of both.
It's nice to know that we have something left alive in the Kerang lakes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Agriculture is also kept alive, and is even thriving, having withdrawn to the higher ground.
And irrigation is doing its best to live down a bad name.
Craig Burrell is a smart, young irrigator making good money by ensuring the water only reaches the roots of his carrot crop.
CRAIG BURRELL: We basically like to know what's happening underneath, down at that three foot, so we're not losing too much water.
So this is why we sort of hit quickly through summer.
Hit the ground quickly with the water and try not to saturate it.
CHRIS MASTERS: But there's a lot of land that can't be saved.
So how long has this land been basically unusable?
And a lot of farmers like Kevin Englis.
He used to flood irrigate barley in this field until a salt concentration approaching seawater killed it.
KEVIN INGLES: It's unviable country.
You cannot flood irrigate country like this.
CHRIS MASTERS: For Kevin himself, there was a soft landing.
One element of the water reform package allows for the trading of water entitlements.
So Kevin was able to sell most of his water, but keep his land.
KEVIN INGLES: Well, my son went to Melbourne, he got a good job down there.
He'll never come back with the social life, the financial life down there.
You can't have that on a farm.
I was an ageing man.
Too busy under flood irrigation, growing lucerne, and far too much work involved.
And then the ability to be able to sell your water became a reality.
Which I did -- I sold my water.
At a high price.
It couldn't have been a better thing to happen for me -- was to be able to sell my water.
CHRIS MASTERS: Kevin's water has gone across the hill to Brown Brothers who use it to grow wine grapes at a far better return per megalitre.
But for much of the rest of the land and the region, as with Kevin, there's retirement.
TIM FISHER: It's like flogging a dead horse, really.
You shouldn't be farming areas with leaky soils and high watertables.
It's just patently unsustainable and it's much cheaper in the long run to pack up shop.
CHRIS MASTERS: A little further up the catchment, the water equals wealth equation is more evident.
While a megalitre, an Olympic swimming pool of water, might return an old-fashioned pasture irrigator around $15, here in the Goulburn Valley they get thousands.
On a newly opened market, water is free to flow to more profitable industries.
The Varapodio farm has grown a large export business around stone fruit.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Well, the new system's got a lot of advantages because we save at least 30 per cent of the water and we're actually putting the water in the right spot along the tree line and we're just irrigating the trees and we're not wasting water out into the middle of the tree line.
CHRIS MASTERS: Where we're walking now.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Where we're walking now.
CHRIS MASTERS: By importing Israeli micro-jet irrigation technology, Santo Varapodio is one farmer who is managing to do more with less.
The move was made as much for the sake of saving the water as it was for the sake of saving the farm.
SANTO VARAPODIO: Well, the warning bell, especially on stone fruit, started to ring when we were losing a lot of trees by being waterlogged for the surface water that was lying, because the moment you have surface water lying on stone fruit trees, they don't last very long.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Varapodios have been able to buy up some of the less efficient farms around them.
There you can see the old sprinklers indiscriminately tossing water about alongside equally inefficient, open, leaking channels.
How typical is the smart irrigator?
WAYNE MEYER: Ah, it's certainly growing, and that's a good thing.
But in terms of the total area of irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin, for example, and in terms of the amount of water that's used, by far the most water and the most area is on pastures with surface irrigation.
CHRIS MASTERS: Which is very, very inefficient.
WAYNE MEYER: It is pretty inefficient in terms of what you get back for the water you put on.
CHRIS MASTERS: Irrigation and the fruit industry remain an economic saviour throughout the Goulburn Valley.
But here too, they are buying time.
On the Tatura Golf Course, salinity is wearing through the fairway.
At the Marukna cemetery, they are repairing crumbling gravestones.
All through the region and all across Australia, you can hear the beat of the pumps fighting to keep the economy breathing above a reaching watertable.
There are problems, too, of discharge.
The Goulburn River is a large deliverer of phosphorous that precipitates blue-green algae.
It doesn't matter where you go, getting the right balance of removing clear profit and returning clean water is perplexing.
And the pressure does not ease when you cross the Murray into NSW.
GEORGE WARNE, CEO, MURRAY IRRIGATION LIMITED: Certainly we feel it through the community via the media and government and our irrigators are becoming increasingly nervous about what is a fair share of the water of the Murray for them.
And for their farm businesses and obviously for the dependent communities.
So the pressure's on.
CHRIS MASTERS: A private company, Murray Irrigation, pulls more water than the entire allocation for South Australia.
Murray Irrigation is also a big example of one of the biggest reforms.
In 1995, around 1,600 local irrigators assumed ownership of these antiquated supply systems when the old public scheme was privatised.
FRANCIS GREY: If you call a privatisation process where you take an asset which is a disaster in terms of economic performance and give it away to the people who use it in the hope that they'll take it on, I guess that's privatisation.
But it's not privatisation in the sense that we sell it off and we make lots of money out of it, like Telstra.
So in that sense, it's been a success.
GRAEME SAMUEL: We would expect that full cost recovery will be in place in the very, very near future.
That's meant some substantial changes because it has meant, in some areas, that those on the land particularly are paying more for their water than they were paying in the past.
But on the other hand, they now have a tradable water right which is ensuring that water is now being used more productively, more efficiently, and it's actually encouraging those who are on the land to move to far more productive and efficient irrigation processes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here in NSW, they are also pumping for their lives.
Murray Irrigation was set environmental objectives to bring the watertable down and reduce the amount of salt being released into the Murray.
KARL MATHERS, MANAGER, SUB SURFACE DRAINAGE, MURRAY IRRIGATION LTD: So, that's maintained the watertable at about 3m across this area, so below the root zone and keeping with the scheme's objectives.
CHRIS MASTERS: In one year, 240,000 tonnes of salt was locked up, reducing input into the Murray, improving health and fortune downstream.
They believe 60,000 hectares of their own land gets a direct benefit -- about 1/13th of the total area.
GEORGE WARNE: Yes, but it was the area most at risk and it's also an area that's crisscrossed with a riverine plain.
So there's been enormous spin-off benefits for health of the rivers -- the Niemur and the Wakool River, which run into the Murray.
And in turn, there's been a huge benefit, I believe, for the people who live downstream.
CHRIS MASTERS: And what's the ultimate objective?
Do you want to cart this away?
GEORGE WARNE: Yeah -- I think the farmers here would like to see salt leaving in truck-loads, 'cause there's a perception then that what you're doing is sustainable.
CHRIS MASTERS: But it costs at least a dollar a tonne to lock up the salt and, so far, they've not found too many buyers.
What is hardest of all is managing the change to sustainability when survival is already a battle.
How marginal is farming?
GORDON SPENCE: Well, there hasn't been nothing in it with the wool crash and the costs for over the last four or five years.
We're not making a profit and our costs, our workers comp and all, are really killing us.
CHRIS MASTERS: Reduced access to water has meant Gordon Spence has scaled back his farming.
GORDON SPENCE: Why cut us back to 78 per cent when the Murray River is running to waste and the water's running out the bottom of South Australia?
CHRIS MASTERS: So, do you think the bureaucrats and politicians actually do know what's best when it comes to water management?
GORDON SPENCE: Well, I often wonder whether they know which way the Murray runs, some of them!
CHRIS MASTERS: From the Southern Riverina, we move north towards the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, and the further north you go, the harder this seems to get.
The big crop around here is rice, and you need an inland sea of it to get a crop.
TIM FISHER: That's an area which, I think, suffers from leaky soils and inappropriate irrigation practices.
Some of the areas in the Coleambally district are just not appropriate for irrigated rice.
But I think that's one area which may be in denial about the impacts that they're having.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally was inspired and created by government.
In 1968, the Murrumbidgee was joined to the Snowy scheme, and after the civil engineering came the social engineering.
People were encouraged to come here and bid for a block.
DAVID TAYLOR: It's a well-known fact that we shouldn't have irrigated this country in the first place.
David and Gillian Taylor have a Merino property right next-door to the Coleambally scheme.
So, David, why did you dig the hole in the first place?
DAVID TAYLOR: Well, it was very hard to find information on what was happening under the ground and I guess it's an area which we're all guessing at the moment.
And we wanted to see what was happening.
GILLIAN TAYLOR: You can see the salt in the ground.
You can see the water -- it's putrid.
It's like a cancer.
Actually, I don't stay here very often.
I just bring people here, look at it, and go.
CHRIS MASTERS: Despite their problem with the watertable, the Taylors are beyond picking a fight with their neighbours.
At Coleambally, the battle to change and survive belongs to everyone.
DAVID TAYLOR: Our past is not all that great -- the way that we've run our country.
I think that, you know, that the dry-land sheep farmer had as much or more to answer for for the actual degradation of our lands.
And so we have to change.
LEITH BOULLY: I think that's where we need to move towards and, of course, that challenges the very notion of democracy in this country where rugged individualism is important and valued, becoming wealthy is important and valued, and working together is sometimes seen as a bit soft and perhaps, um --
CHRIS MASTERS: Un-Australian.
LEITH BOULLY: ..un-Australian -- yes!
CHRIS MASTERS: So, we've got a long way to go?
LEITH BOULLY: Yes, despite this notion of mateship and the myth of communities pulling together, it's very difficult for communities to do that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Thinking beyond your own boundary has been easier at Coleambally because everyone shares the challenge.
JOHN LAURIE: Back in '92, '93, we realised we had problems in the area, so, through salt action, we had this well installed.
And at the time of installation, the watertable level in this area was to within eight inches, 20cm, of the surface.
And I was wondering why crops were going backwards and I couldn't get machinery on country and so it went on and on and on.
CHRIS MASTERS: John Laurie describes himself as a reformed gung-ho irrigator.
John has planted lucerne alongside the rice and soya beans as one of a suite of measures to attack the watertable.
JOHN LAURIE: We're not irrigating the lucerne.
We're using it as a pump.
And as a result of that, we're seeing this flag gradually drop in the hole.
And our aim is to get it into this green area here, where we know that that watertable is where we want it and we can quite comfortably irrigate our country.
CHRIS MASTERS: Crop substitution is another hope.
Finding a crop that better suits the soil, is less greedy for water, and still makes a dollar, is why Tom Graham has assigned his best paddock to a hardwood plantation.
TOM GRAHAM: I can't believe myself, really, that these trees look like they are now after slightly over three years.
I wouldn't have believed it myself.
Now, when you add in the fact that I'm using only 1/4 of the water that I am on my rice crop, for example, well, nothing makes me feel better than that.
CHRIS MASTERS: Across Coleambally, a re-education program is under way.
MAN IN CLASSROOM: OK, we've got irrigation and rainfall coming in.
How much of that is going back into the atmosphere or running away through transpiration, evaporation and run-off?
CHRIS MASTERS: 30 years after the irrigation scheme went in, farmers are trying to understand what is happening underground.
MAN IN CLASSROOM: So going back to our diagram again, we want to keep the watertable down below two metres, where it can't affect the health of our crops.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally Irrigation -- another privatised irrigation company owned by the farmers -- is paying to send its people back to school.
RODNEY FOSTER: I went to a few meetings.
At the start, I was a bit back --
I wasn't backwards, but I was --
I was a bit, you know, "I'm not going to do that," and, "They can't make me do that."
But I went to a couple of classes and they're a lot more flexible than when they were a government-run department.
CHRIS MASTERS: 30 years after people were encouraged to believe there was limitless inexpensive water, the rules have changed.
And this is not about rice and farms.
It is about people and a town with shops, schools and cricket team.
MARGARET BURGE: We can cope with whatever financial decisions we have to make, but we cannot cope with policy changes that come with the slash of a pen.
CHRIS MASTERS: What sympathy do you have for those communities who were led down the road of putting in these irrigation schemes but told to cut down the trees and use as much water as they possibly could, Um, now being told by a new administration that they've done the wrong thing.
GRAEME SAMUEL: Oh, a lot of sympathy.
But sympathy's not enough.
CHRIS MASTERS: Coleambally is one of a thousand rural communities that know this only too well, and see Graeme Samuel as yet another grim reaper from the city.
Like the other communities, Coleambally will fight for its life.
The big question being asked is, if they lose, who pays?
GRAEME SAMUEL: I sometimes hear politicians talk about the fact that they're now listening to their electors, and I see 'listening' as a code word for doing nothing.
What's terribly important now, I think, is the Government's realised you can't suddenly introduce new processes, new rules, new regulations, and new water management policies overnight -- and expect communities to adjust when they have been living for years, sometimes decades, under processes and rules and regulations which are entirely contradictory to those now being put in place.
There's an adjustment process of education and there's an adjustment process that requires financial advice, financial assistance, and advice and counselling in a very, very wide range of matters.
CHRIS MASTERS: As you travel further north, you see from the air what we often miss on the ground.
The further you go, the more you think of those extinct landscapes in the west and the south, and wonder why it's happening all over again.
In the late '90s, New South Wales was clearing land at the rate of about 30,000 hectares a year.
New South Wales is by far the biggest user of water in the basin and is still straining to keep below the cap agreed to in 1995.
LEITH BOULLY: 10 years ago, the lessons from the south were starting to emerge.
People in the north weren't looking south because they felt their system was different.
And I think one of the things we learn is we don't learn from other people's mistakes.
You have to suffer it yourself quite often before you learn.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I'm disappointed that the regulatory arrangements in those areas' jurisdictions has been so weak, and they don't start to really address those issues until it's too late.
We should be avoiding these mistakes, not continuing to remake them.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD, NSW PARKS AND WILDLIFE: You know a lot of the people who have lived for a long time on a river, in essence, they're in deep sorrow.
Actually, sort of regretting, you know, the path that we've taken for that river system -- 'cause it's actually very difficult to turn back.
CHRIS MASTERS: There are now laws to protect remaining wetlands -- laws that speak for the birds, the biodiversity and the future.
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD: There's no greater sight than seeing one of these river systems in full flood with water birds breeding in their absolute thousands.
And fish species, you know, running across roads sometimes.
And frogs come out of their cocoons.
So, it is an amazing sight.
CHRIS MASTERS: Following heavy summer rain, the Narran Lakes, in the north of the State, are putting on a show.
But according to Richard Kingsford, the burst of life is a prelude to the same slow death we've seen in the south and the west.
Then, what are some examples we can see of the impact of that tap being turned off?
DR RICHARD KINGSFORD: Well, ultimately, probably over the next 50 to 100 years, you will be able to go out into the periphery of this wetland, where there are red gums like the ones that we see here, and some of the lignum here, will start to die.
If you said to the Australian community, we have a national park on the east coast and we're going to log 70 per cent of it, or we're going to mine 70 per cent of it, imagine the sort of reaction that would occur.
But, in essence, that's what's happened.
We've had 70 per cent of the water taken out of that system, and really there hasn't been that much debate in the general community.
CHRIS MASTERS: Much of the water being lost to the Narran Lakes is going to cotton farms north on the Balonne in Queensland.
Queensland is the only State in the basin not to have completely signed off on the cap.
DON BLACKMORE, CEO, MURRAY DARLING BASIN COMMITTEE: I think you've got to say it's disappointing.
In fact, you can use stronger words than that -- that they haven't had the ability to finalise a cap.
But, quite frankly, they are part of the basin, and at the end of the day, you know, you're in the boat, you row with the rest of the team.
CHRIS MASTERS: Much of the development is new, and it is still going in.
Queensland has been knocking down trees faster than anyone, but Queensland makes the case that within the basin, it's a small user of water.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: Oh, that's true -- they haven't developed their resource to the extent that NSW have, and they're not overdeveloped.
They've been rapidly developing, and one would like to think that instead of seeing NSW, which everyone accepts is overdeveloped, as a benchmark to aim for, they would be trying to learn from those mistakes.
CHRIS MASTERS: Queensland points out it has nothing like the salination problems evident in the south.
DR GRAHAM HARRIS, CHIEF, CSIRO LAND AND WATER: Salt will get you in the end, and there is absolutely nothing to say that salinity is a problem which stops at the NSW border.
CHRIS MASTERS: The further north you go, the more you question the political courage and competence to reconcile the competition for water.
Cubbie Station is Australia's largest private farm.
The access channel is bigger than the Culgoa River that feeds it.
Cubbie has enough water capacity to just about fill Sydney Harbour.
One of the engineers who helped build it, Bill Wuth, took us on a tour.
That's flood plain there.
BILL WUTH: That's flood plain there.
CHRIS MASTERS: Cleverly graded to gravity-feed the water, the farm practically runs itself.
In this year, they'll gross $60 million from the cotton.
BILL WUTH: Water here is collected and dispensed by the enterprise itself.
The infrastructure hasn't been paid for by government, it's been paid for by private enterprise.
And that's the cost -- it's not free.
Never has been.
CHRIS MASTERS: Cubbie pays the government an administration fee of $3,800 a year for those hundreds of thousands of Olympic swimming pools of water.
Across a few hills at St George, it's very different.
RAY KIDD: This water, as it comes through the waterwheels here, will be costing us about $28 a megalitre.
CHRIS MASTERS: And how secure is your right to the water?
RAY KIDD: Well, nowhere near as secure as we were hoping it would have been.
CHRIS MASTERS: The irrigators north of Cubbie are supplied by a public storage -- the Beardmore Dam.
Queensland, like NSW, has a sorry history of promising more water than heaven can deliver.
The Queensland Government has capped further development but, at some stage, the Government will have to go back on those promises.
And the threat of the withdrawal of what is seen as a right is turning irrigator against irrigator.
MAN: We now have a situation where different irrigators think they own the same water.
SCOTT ARMSTRONG: The Government's spending millions and millions promoting water use efficiency, but their own departments are operated -- you know, they operate the schemes in such a way that -- just appalling levels of efficiency and evaporation.
DON BLACKMORE: I think what you see, not only in Queensland but in other areas, is some perverse and unexpected outcomes of particular policies.
One of them was you didn't have to get a permit if your dam was less than five metres high.
Well, by any yardstick, that's been a dumb policy.
CHRIS MASTERS: So, if we are still making such fundamental blunders, how can we be sure we know how to properly spend the Howard Government-initiated salinity package billions?
LEITH BOULLY: No, quite often we don't know how to spend that money, and there's a few principles that we need to use.
A -- we have to have the knowledge and the data about the natural resources to ensure that we are addressing the cause of the problem, not the symptoms of it.
And we need to be very careful that we're being strategic, and putting money to the things that will make a big difference, not a small difference.
CHRIS MASTERS: Meanwhile, the frenzy of pumping to exploit the land in the north continues to the accompaniment of the beat of pumps all across Australia to buy time and save the land.
A preference for engineering solutions over more scientific research gives rise to concern that it will be used to prop up unsustainable industry, throwing good money after bad.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I would have liked to think that some of those people would by now have learnt that ignorance hasn't been a very good guide for action in the past.
And it's that sort of mentality -- of let the bulldozers rip -- that has created the current problems.
And as a scientist I'd like to think that we were smarter than that and can learn from our mistakes, and that we do try to base our investments, and they're community investments, on the basis of reasonable knowledge rather than a hunch.
CHRIS MASTERS: Here in the bush, where communities ARE actively engaged in the struggle to better manage water, there is exasperation at what little is known of reforms that affect all Australians.
We all get the bill that funds the changes, be it paying compensation for dispossessed farmers, the real cost of food, and the final bill for fixing a broken land.
GILLIAN TAYLOR: We're all addressing change in some way.
People in suburbia, like Australia as a suburban-type community, we've lost our contact with our land, and our understanding of where our basic commodities come from.
So I don't think it's only the rural people that have to accept change -- it's the whole community.
CHRIS MASTERS: Australia will be a very different country if we manage the changes.
The agricultural face of Australia will be different.
And if we don't change, you don't have to look far to see what we're in for.
TIM FISHER: As a nation, I think we've got a literacy problem.
We don't know how to read our landscape.
I think in many ways we still see it through European eyes, by and large.
And we need to understand our landscape a lot better.
Unless we start to understand the values and significance of our rivers and waterways, then we really can't hope to know what to do, or even why we should do it.
So it's a big challenge ahead.