Water Articles 2018-2020

Since the days of Joseph in ancient Egypt, droughts have periodically rationed water and food supplies for humans and wildlife. Sensible peoples store water, but it is about 40 years since Australians built a big dam – young Aussie engineers have no damn experience.

Earlier this week some 3,000 irrigators and their supporters rallied in Canberra against government policy on Murray-Darling irrigation and management.  With the  cacophony of dozens of semi-trailers’ blaring horns, it was certainly noisy. Ominously for the National Party, their representatives were treated with 

The Murray-Darling is the only major region where irrigation plays a prominent role. Water availability there has the urgent attention of politicians because locals, unhappy at measures that have deprived farmers of water, have helped displace Nationals representatives in favour of those from the Shooters, Fish

There is a considerable interest in water in the Murray Darling, an issue that I have written about over the two decades during which concerted attacks on irrigation took place.  Most of my articles and reports, including my latest piece in The Spectator, drew attention to the effect of taking water

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From little things, big things grow. And so, for the 60 odd years until the nineteen-nineties, we saw the land in the Murray Darling basin being developed from what was mainly arid low-yield farmland into a province producing over 40 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output.  Dams transformed the highly irregular

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The Murray Darling River is facing a plethora of publicity: fish deaths due to mismanagement of flows by the responsible body, farmer agitation as a result of loss of irrigation water, claims that the water buybacks behind the farmer concerns have been at excessive prices

The Nationals are paraded as having had a poor election.  This is not obvious – the Nationals got 9.7 per cent of the vote in the Legislative Assembly, a swing against them of 0.9 per cent, in the context of considerable opposition on their traditional turf with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers (SFF) increasing their

Over the past century, the Murray Darling river’s naturally highly irregular flows have been transformed to convert it into the tranquil, ever-flowing waterway that has allowed the Basin it serves to become the source of 41 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output