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Water - National News - June 2008 |
Australian Capital Territory; New South Wales; Northern Territory; Queensland; South Australia; Tasmania; Victoria; Western Australia
23/06/08 When it comes to water, quality is no less vital than quantity, Peter Fisher, The Age
23/06/08 Here's how the Murray can live, Kenneth Davidson The Age Opinion
21/06/08 Time to dither about the Murray has run out ; Editorial The Age
21/06/08 When the river runs dry, Martin Flanagan The Age Related
21/06/08 Campbell floats compo plan for Japanese whalers Michelle Grattan The Age
20/06/08 Goulburn River health check 'very poor', Chris Hammer, Canberra The Age
20/06/08 Murray-Darling may be dead before States act, Paul Sinclair, ACF; The Age, Opinion
20/06/08 Running out of time, Chris Hammer, The Age
19/06/08 Murray lakes may be lost, Chris Hammer, The Age
19/06/08 Murray-Darling full of carp: report The Age
18/06/08 Murray-Darling months from disaster, The Age AAP
18/06/08 Murray-Darling Basin is dying: report, AAP Related
16/06/08 Murrumbidgee accused of hogging water, AAP
GLOBALLY, it's hardly surprising that the emphasis on water supply these days is on how to get more. Water consumption is doubling every 20 years as the world's population balloons towards 10 billion and growth in China drives a switch to higher-protein, more water-intensive diets.
In Europe, climate change and affluence are proving an equally menacing combination: 200 million sun-lovers are flocking into coastal areas of the Mediterranean every year. As resort tourists they use four times more water each day than the average Spanish city dweller, putting yet more pressure on supplies already affected by drought.
Meanwhile for Victoria, city water storages near the trigger point for level 4 restrictions, predictions of a dry winter and the plight of agriculture in the Murray-Darling see to it that scrounging more water sources is top concern.
Attracting far less attention is the toll that this thirst for water is having on the health of watercourses, wetlands and lakes. Gretchen Daily, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, says humans are commandeering half of the globe's accessible fresh water and this will rise to nearly three-quarters by 2030, threatening to dehydrate nature altogether.
Last month a meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity was told that damage to ecosystems and species loss costs $A2.2 trillion to $5 trillion a year. In other words, protecting the environment makes good economic sense.
Certainly, installation of advanced treatment systems to produce high-purity water suggests that governments are beginning to take water quality more seriously. However, drinking water aside, this relates to applications where human health could be compromised, such as with market-garden irrigation at Clyde and snow-making at Mount Hotham.
There appears to be no similar resolve when it comes to Victoria's Ramsar Treaty-listed wetland chain in Gippsland the Sale City Common, Heart Morass and Dowd Morass wetlands, Lake Wellington and Lake Victoria. These magic places are home to the greater egret and the royal spoonbill, migratory birds that should be protected under international treaties Australia has with Japan and China.
Unhappily, a network of farm drains and watercourses is relentlessly carrying nutrients into this wetland chain from the dung of 100,000 cows equivalent to the untreated effluent from a city the size of Adelaide. What's more, reduced flushing of the lakes is resulting in seawater intrusion due to Melbourne's upstream water take and diversions by irrigators.
Since January last year, extensive bushfires and flooding have also affected the health of aquatic life and undoubtedly led to the outbreak of a huge blue-green algal bloom on Lake Victoria last summer that persists today. It's easy to finger nutrients for all the woes. In the right amounts they are essential to life, but in excess, as with the algal bloom, they can snuff it out.
In a partial accounting of chemical exposure for the lakes, water samples were taken to see whether the antibiotics used in animal husbandry on Macalister Irrigation District dairy farms and excreted in dung and urine were leaching into drains, creeks and the Latrobe River. New data shows that they are indeed doing so and are thus capable of producing resistant wild bacteria.
It is doubly disturbing that new American research has established that earthworms can take up antibiotics and, as an important food source for wildlife, possibly provide a pathway for these substances to move up the food chain.
Medical researchers, too, have expressed concern about a world gripped by super bugs. A recent Sydney study, for example, found that more than 90% of the harmless E.coli bacteria in the guts of healthy people are drug-resistant.
Part of the answer lies with better farming practices. Changes to the way dairy shed waste is handled and better maintenance of retention ponds, including increasing their size, would curb the leaching. Watering stock from troughs rather than dams and attending to badly-worn teat-scraping dairy access tracks would reduce disease vectors, and so lessen the need for antibiotics. But continuously relooping run-off back onto the land to confine nutrients (and save water) will result in increasing concentrations of antibiotics and salt.
Lastly, there is the thorny issue of chemical mixtures. If data on endocrine-disrupting compounds in South Australian rivers is any guide, substances such as the powerful synthetic hormone prostaglandin, used to abort cow foetuses, may be present in the watercourses, as might Hexazinone (sprayed on forestry plantations) and Atrazine (sprayed on crops, especially corn).
There is so much we don't understand about these intricate aquatic environments. Could it be, for instance, that recent dolphin deaths had something to do with an algae-derived toxic acid that attacks the brain and can cause seizures, as has been reported for sea lions and dolphins in California?
The wider ramifications are clear: moves to improve irrigation efficiency and provide integrated data on water resources and usage through the Australian Water Resources Information System also need to target water quality with comprehensive
in-stream monitoring programs, on-farm preventive management and upgrades to rural sewerage plants.
To this end, water science and the monitoring of technology need to be considerably strengthened and efforts increased to meet the challenge presented by the new climatic landscape of sporadic deluges and bushfires fanned by cyclonic winds.
Dr Peter Fisher is an environment management consultant who researches and teaches about water management.
Kenneth Davidson The Age Opinion
June 23, 2008
SENATOR Penny Wong is now responsible for the Murray River and it's official the river is dying. Last week a scientific report to water ministers was leaked to the press that said that either 400 gigalitres of water must be flushed down to the mouth of the Murray by October or the lower Murray would be permanently lost in October this year.
The report was in the hands of the ministers in April. The only recorded reaction of Wong thus far is that she hoped it would rain.
This was one report that should have been made available to the public immediately in order to galvanise public opinion for the radical measures that must be taken if South Australia can be saved.
I have been writing on this issue since last December. The only official response I have received has been disinformation from the Victorian water minister, Tim Holding, and nothing from Wong.
It must be said at once. The bell that tolls for the demise of the lower Murray also tolls for the rest of Australia.
If nothing is done to flush out the lakes at the mouth of the Murray, the acidification that has already partially destroyed several wetlands will eventually end up in Adelaide's drinking water.
To stop this seepage, scientists estimate 400 gigalitres will have to be released from somewhere along the upper Murray-Darling-Goulburn or there will have to be a spring deluge in the catchment area that will provide an equivalent amount of water.
Spring rains on the scale necessary in the catchment before October are unlikely. There is more than 400 gigalitres available in dams and lakes along the Darling that are reserved for irrigation and environmental flows.
Somehow, if Wong wants to save SA which is her home she will have to persuade the NSW water minister to forgo 400 gigalitres of water (equal to Melbourne's demand for one year).
The politics will be ugly. Wong's best bet is to spell the choices out frankly to the electorate, basing them on a risk management assessment.
On the one hand is the death of parts of the lower Murray; Russian roulette for the bulk of the SA population. On the other hand is stress for the wetlands and irrigators along the Darling. If there is agreement to take water from the Darling catchment to save the lower Murray, no permanent harm will be done, providing the upper Darling catchment gets a reasonable supply of summer rain. Fortunately, climate change appears to be favouring summer rain in south-west Queensland.
As painful as these choices are, they only provide life support for the lower Murray for a year, a brief window of opportunity for more radical surgery.
Lake Alexandrina should be cut in half, with one half flooded with sea water so that the supplementary Murray water flows required to save the remnant lakes and prevent acidic seepage into most of SA's potable water supply is halved from 400 gigalitres this year to about 200 gigalitres next and subsequent years.
Splitting Lake Alexandrina in half and the associated work on Lake Albert is a massive earth-moving project, but it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good: the gas explosion in Western Australia has resulted in enforced idleness in skilled people and earth-moving machinery. They could be used to divide Lake Alexandrina within four months.
At the same time, the Victorian Government should conscript the tunnelling equipment now being used on a project in the Victorian Alps with a lower state and national priority to build a 30-kilometre tunnel to connect the Upper Yarra/Thompson dam to Lake Eildon. This would take about 12 months and cost about
$300 million. This would allow 200 gigalitres to be diverted from the Gippsland side of the Great Divide into the Murray-Goulburn catchment, eliminating the invidious choices between irrigation and environmental flows along the three rivers.
Readers of this column are aware that there are a range of ways to replace the water lost from the Thompson, including supplementary dams and diversions in Gippsland, banning logging in catchment areas, exploiting Melbourne aquifers capable of providing more than 100 gigalitres of water to Melbourne and piping water across Bass Strait from the north-west corner of Tasmania .
Why won't Wong and the Brumby Government consider these cheaper and environmentally superior alternatives to a desal plant and the north-south pipeline?
Holding has claimed a Melbourne Water study has shown the cost of the Tasmanian pipeline would be $12 billion.
Can we see the study that shows the cost would be $34 million per kilometre in a relatively benign environment where the maximum depth is 70 metres? I don't think so.
The recently completed Ormen Lange North Sea gas pipeline in a far more hostile environment at depths of up to 950 metres cost $3 million per kilometre to build.
Wong wrote in April that the north-south pipeline and the Wonthaggi desal plant "have been subjected to extensive cost-benefit analysis to ensure they deliver value for money and secure reliable water supply". Really? Extensive cost-benefit analysis usually considers the alternatives as well as the environment, and if the study is legitimate, it is made public. If Wong is serious about saving the lower Murray and the people who depend on it, her government will have to display real leadership, set up a body with powers similar to a war cabinet and get on with the mega job of ensuring permanent environmental flows for the lower Murray.
Editorial The Age
June 21, 2008
Australia's water ministers must decide whether to save the river's lower lakes, or abandon them to the sea.
SPRING is the season of new life. But when Australia heads into spring later this year, it may be too late to save the lower reaches of this country's only great river system from death. All but three of the 23 rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin have been given poor or very poor ecological report cards, and the increasingly saline lakes at the mouth of the Murray are in danger of evaporating into toxic sludge. The natural flow to the lakes has been so disrupted that federal Water Minister Penny Wong and her state counterparts may be faced with deciding to open the barrages that keep the ocean tides at bay, and allowing the sea to claim the lower lakes. It would be a defeat; but, say those who argue for this measure, allowing nature to take its present course would be an even greater one.
The alternative, urged by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Greens, would be to increase flows by reducing allocations to irrigators upstream in the basin and releasing water from storages. That, too, would require concerted action by the ministers, but Senator Wong's reaction to the leaked report earlier this week that alerted Australia to the imminent death of the lower lakes was merely to say that a decision "could be taken" before the next scheduled meeting of the ministers in November, if they were advised that urgent action was necessary. In other words, the ministers might still wait until the spring to act on a report that says the river mouth could be dead by spring.
The report, by the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin Natural Resource Management Board, insists that the decline of the lakes can be reversed only if substantial amounts of fresh water flow into the lakes by October. The ministers have apparently been in possession of that intelligence since last month. If they share any sense of crisis about what is happening to the Murray-Darling, their demeanour gives no evidence of it.
This week, we also saw the release of the Murray-Darling Commission's audit of rivers in the basin, which confirms that almost all of them are in a dire state, with reduced flows and depleted native fish stocks. As expected, the rivers in the south of the basin are in a worse state that those in the north, and, ominously for the Victorian Government's water plan, the worst of all is the Goulburn River, from which the Government intends to pipe water to Melbourne. The overall health of the Goulburn was rated as poor and the state of its fish stocks as very poor: it has relatively few fish and 60% of them are introduced species such as carp.
The State Government defends the diversion of water from the Goulburn by arguing that 225 gigalitres a year will be saved from improvements to irrigation systems, and Victoria's Water Minister, Tim Holding, insists the state is not ignoring the plight of the Murray system. He has cited Victoria's obligations under the Living Murray Initiative, under which the state is required to return 214 gigalitres to the river by July next year. The Government's critics, however, claim that 120 gigalitres of this water consists of entitlements that may be available only in very wet years which appear to be getting rarer in southern Australia. On some estimates, this class of water may be available on the Goulburn in only seven years in every 100.
Whatever the accuracy of such predictions, Mr Holding's protest that governments have not been "sitting on their hands" while the river dies is not convincing. Like Senator Wong, he shows none of the sense of urgency that is so clearly evident in the scientific reports. Senator Wong perhaps does not wish to give any hint that she might be preparing to be the minister who signs the death warrant of internationally acclaimed wetlands, and Mr Holding is a member of a Government noted for not bending to public criticism. But at the very least, the parlous state of the Goulburn revealed in the audit justifies a reassessment of the pipeline plan.
As for the decision that Senator Wong and the state ministers must make about the lower lakes, it clearly cannot be left until November. The Council of Australian Governments meets early next month, and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, should insist that the future of Australia's iconic river system be a priority issue on the COAG agenda. Nor do governments have time to defer decisions by calling for further studies of the problem; the studies that have been carried out already show that it is time to act.
Martin Flanagan The Age
June 21, 2008
Acidity, salinity, depleted bird life - parts of the Murray are dying, says author and river campaigner Paul Sinclair, even if scientists want to call it "changing form". What's also at stake is an intricate system of connectedness between all things.
PAUL Sinclair says the Coorong, the 140-kilometre-long freshwater estuary at the mouth of the Murray River, is now five to six times saltier than the sea. Once it was home to hundreds of thousands of water birds. Recently, he saw a tortoise from the Coorong entombed in coral that had grown from its back, snaring its head and flippers.
He also knows of a place on the Murray, Bottle Bend, outside Mildura, where the remaining pools of water have turned into sulphuric acid, which will be flushed into the river if the billabong ever floods again. This week, a leaked scientific report said the Coorong wetlands, lakes Albert and Alexandria and the mouth of the Murray could virtually be destroyed by October.
I ask Sinclair if the Murray River is dying. "It's clear that parts of the river are dying," he says.
Sinclair's forebears were Scottish, and he has a Scottish reserve. He uses words carefully and with effort, as if he is not expecting to be easily understood. He says there are scientists who argue that "dying" is an emotionally laden word.
"They say the river is changing form. If I come around to your house and drive a bulldozer through it, am I destroying your home or merely changing its form?"
Sinclair, 39, is a new sort of Australian public intellectual. His view of the environment goes way beyond the polarity of greenies versus rednecks. He is not unlike Tasmanian historian James Boyce, whose book Van Diemen's Land is the first major history of Tasmania since the Windschuttle controversy.
Both Boyce and Sinclair go beyond the politics of blame. Both speak to a new centre in their respective debates and, with that, comes the hope of fresh initiatives. Both, significantly, are products of the places they write about.
Sinclair grew up at Kerang, on the Loddon River, a tributary of the Murray. His first memory of the river is a flood in the early 1970s when he was 12. Flood waters were rising round the town. The army had arrived. His father was out sandbagging. The rain kept drumming on the tin roof and he worried for his father's safety. That was his first memory of the river "as a thing with its own way of being".
The family farm also had stands of black box eucalypts that were a remnant of a river ecology, but the black box trees ended at their fence. Beyond, he says, lay "a moonscape". As a 13-year-old, he would go shooting. When he ventured on to his moonscape, "there was nothing there to shoot. It was very clear what happened to the land if you treated it badly."
He came to the city when he was 18 to attend Melbourne University to study history. Like a lot of people, he suspects, it was leaving home that made him appreciate the place he was from. He found himself irked by the assumptions he encountered "about what was beautiful in nature the wilderness calendar view of the natural world. What was beautiful about the place I was from was a forest of black box gums and a big, slow river."
In 1998, he paddled the Murray with a friend, Jen Hocking. At the end of the trip, they decided to marry. They now have two children and Sinclair has Murray cods patterned on his wedding ring.
In 2001, his doctorate was published as a book, The Murray A River and Its People. One of the influential characters in his view of the Murray River was an old fisherman, Bub Sebastian, of Mitta Mitta. He has several photos of Bub in his book, one of Bub and his brother and a huge haul of Murray cod.
"They fished the buggery out of the river because they thought there was no end to it. Bub damaged the river, but he loved the river and, in his old age, he mourned for the river."
In Sinclair's way of viewing the world, Bub and his brother were "connected" by the river and the fish. "People's connection to place is part of what makes them."
Sinclair's book could be described as the story of all the stories that have shaped how we see the Murray River, from Aboriginal stories, through the stories of the 1890s, which spoke of irrigation as a way of expanding the power of an "all-climate, all-condition embracing British Empire", to 1950s images of the river's water as another form of gold, to the tourist brochures of today.
For millenniums, the Murray ran seasonally, with big floods in winter and spring, until it dried up during a drought in the early 1900s. People along the river complained, politicians said this must never happen again. The answer was seen to be regulating the river with dams and weirs. This meant not only controlling the volume of the flows but also their pathway, so that decisions were taken about what was and was not part of the river. Wetlands and redgum and black box forests edging the river were suddenly without the floods that were part, not only of their natural cycle, but also of the plants and creatures who relied upon these habitats for feeding and breeding.
Regulation of the river began in earnest in the 1930s. Warnings that it was giving rise to dire salinity problems were heard as early as the 1960s. As the volume of water reaching the sea was radically reduced according to Sinclair, by more than 75% the Coorong was no longer flushed clean. Now its tortoises are growing coral. Sinclair explains river ecology with the old song about the shin bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the thigh bone. "Everything connects," he says.
The Murray has had other problems, such as an explosion in its population of European carp. And now it also has global warming. Sinclair says the river is as low as he's seen it.
Is the Murray River a sad story? "Yes," Sinclair replies. A tragic story? He thinks about that before again replying. "Yes."
In his book, he quotes from a report by the Co-operative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission which says that in just two centuries Australians "have set in motion ecological disruptions which will impoverish and haunt future human generations".
I ask him if he is haunted by what has happened to the Murray. Again, it's a while before he answers. He recently saw a relative die of Alzheimer's disease. He saw the person's memory fracture and disappear. He sees something similar happening to this country.
"People know more about the latest reality TV show than they do about the Murray River."
He visits Victoria Market, where wild native fish from the Murray can no longer be bought. "The fish being sold are increasingly coming out of steel tanks and fish farms. We're only just starting to live in this country as genuine Australians and it's slipping away from us. Science really knows very little about the river, and the old people who had folk knowledge of it are dying off. Who's listening to their stories?"
Sinclair now works for the Australian Conservation Foundation. When I first met him, he was involved in a volunteer network called Waterkeepers Australia, which supports local initiatives to repair or defend waterways. Through Sinclair, I met members of the Marlo Angling Club in East Gippsland who took it upon themselves to get a project going to save the Snowy River's indigenous bass.
I also met Howard Jones, an irrigator from Mildura and a grandfather who argues that irrigators have to put some part of their water allocation back into the river for the sake of its future. "Whenever I lose heart," says Sinclair, "I think of people like Howard."
WHEN I ask Sinclair for some good news about the Murray River, he tells me about the Gunbower forest. This year 7.5 billion litres of water have been released into the redgum forest edging the Murray around the northern Victorian town of Cohuna. The forest is home to endangered species such as the Giant Banjo Frog and the Intermediate Egret, which both depend on flooding for survival. Another waterbird, the Great Egret, bred significantly for the first time in five years in 2005 after what is now called "an environmental water release".
Together, we drive up and go for a wade through the inundated areas. It's an odd, almost eerie environment to be in dusty, tinder-dry bush with sheets of waist-high water in it. In what was formerly a wetland much, I imagine, like Kakadu with its profusion of bird life I see only a single bird. To visit Gunbower forest is to hear an environmental clock start ticking in your ears.
Sinclair has recently been to Israel, a country sometimes held up as a model for Australia in its approach to water resources. He does not agree. He acknowledges the Israelis are very good at getting the maximum value from moisture, but says "it is a country which seems to be telling itself a story of how technology will conquer every hurdle. They've used up all their water and there's not enough left to keep their rivers alive."
The most hopeful initiative he saw was a project outside Tel Aviv where Israelis and Palestinians "are flying under the radar" and working together to ease a pollution problem in the local river "because mosquitoes will give you Nile fever regardless of whether you're a Muslim or a Jew".
He sees Australia's position as not yet as desperate as Israel's. "We can still choose to save parts of the Murray. The next two to five years are really going to shape the sort of country our kids inherit."
Martin Flanagan is an Age senior writer and columnist.
Water International 23/03/08 French sought for Dead Sea plan, Carolynne Wheeler, Jerusalem TELEGRAP: Gaping sinkholes and buildings that have collapsed into the mud mark the steady retreat of the Dead Sea, which is under threat after decades of environmental abuse.
Former minister Ian Campbell on Cottesloe beach yesterday. Photo: Tony Ashby
IAN Campbell, former Coalition environment minister, wants the international community to set up a structural adjustment fund to pay out Japanese who would be hit by an end to whaling.
As he prepares to leave for Santiago, Chile, where the International Whaling Commission meets next week, Mr Campbell, a member of the advisory board of the radical group Sea Shepherd, said a fund would probably only need "tens of millions". He was confident the Rudd Government would "happily contribute".
The assistance would go to those on the three or four whaling ships and to the process workers who lost jobs.
"It would not be dissimilar to closing an abattoir," Mr Campbell said.
He points to the example of the $200 million adjustment package the Howard government provided as part of protecting the Barrier Reef.
Mr Campbell also said, in an interview with The Age, that the commission should be renamed to include the word "conservation", to counter the Japanese attempt to have whaling treated like ordinary fishing.
The meeting, attended by Environment Minister Peter Garrett, will again pit Australia against Japan, in a fresh test for the relationship.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to defuse the row between the two countries on his recent visit to Japan, stressing that Australia wanted a diplomatic solution.
Mr Campbell, who as minister lobbied intensively to bolster the anti-whaling majority on the commission, fears some countries on the "soft" end of the conservation scale may be attracted to the Japanese argument to "normalise" whaling.
"The biggest risk is the Japanese driving an agenda of so-called 'reform' of the commission," he said.
"The Japanese blamed me for creating disharmony in the commission. They wanted whales treated like any other fish and the commission like any other international fishing body."
Mr Campbell is not critical of the Government for apparently backing away from international legal action against the Japanese.
He explored this option with then attorney-general Philip Ruddock in late 2006, but found such action would have a "low chance of success. If it failed, it would tell the Japanese that scientific whaling was legal."
Most Japanese would disagree with their Government's stance on whaling, Mr Campbell said.
"The Japanese foreign service is deeply embarrassed by it," he said. "They would like it to go away. It belongs in the first half of the last century."
Australia, which stopped whaling in the 1970s, "probably has the drive and enthusiasm of reformed smokers" for the anti-whaling cause, he said.
Mr Campbell's ministerial career came to an abrupt halt in March last year when it was discovered he had had a meeting with notorious former WA premier Brian Burke.
The Howard government was making much of Mr Rudd's contacts with Mr Burke, so Mr Campbell, a senior Senate cabinet minister, was forced to fall on his sword. Soon after, Mr Campbell quit Parliament.
Chris Hammer, Canberra The Age
June 20, 2008
THE Goulburn River has been found to have the poorest health of any of the 23 rivers in the Murray-Darling basin even as the Victorian Government pushes ahead with plans to pipe 75 gigalitres of water a year out of it for use in Melbourne.
The finding comes from the most comprehensive survey of the health of the basin undertaken The Sustainable Rivers Audit released by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission yesterday.
Eril Rathjen, from the Plug the Pipe campaign, said the audit strengthens the case to stop the north-south pipeline.
"Every report that comes out, whether it's from the CSIRO or the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, highlights the critical state of the river," Ms Rathjen said. "We need to keep the water within the Murray-Darling and not take it out of the basin for urban use in Melbourne."
The Victorian Government has said the water it plans to divert from the Goulburn will be more than offset by savings of 225 gigalitres a year that will flow from a billion-dollar program to improve irrigation systems.
The audit rates the overall health of the river as "very poor" the second lowest ranking on a five-point scale. Its fish life is rated one rank lower: extremely poor. There are relatively few fish, and 60% of those that persist are introduced species such as carp.
The auditors weren't able to find a number of native fish at all including freshwater catfish, Macquarie perch and mountain galaxias in areas where they were expected to be common. The state of the river's invertebrates yabbies, larvae and the like was rated as poor, as was river flow.
While the audit rates the health of the river, it does not seek to explain why it is so poor.
Juliet Le Feuvre, of Environment Victoria, said the condition of the Goulburn had been caused by too much water being taken out of the river for too long.
"Last year it had over 80% of its water extracted, and the water that was left in was not really for the river's purposes, it was for delivery to irrigators downstream," Ms Le Feuvre said.
She said no water should be diverted to Melbourne until the water savings promised by the Victorian Government became a reality.
Of the 10 Victorian rivers that flow into the basin, eight were rated very poor and two poor.
Of the Murray-Darling's 23 rivers, only the Paroo, flowing from Queensland into northern NSW, was rated as having a good level of ecological health. Two more rivers, also in Queensland, were rated moderate, seven as poor and 13 as very poor.
Federal Water Minister Penny Wong described the findings of the audit as sobering.
Paul Sinclair, ACF The Age , Opinion
June 20, 2008
Victoria can do its bit to rescue the Murray. But will it?
I
N THE past two days we have had two chilling reminders about the sick state of the Murray-Darling Basin's rivers. On Tuesday, a leaked scientific report that was presented in May to the Victorian Water Minister and the other relevant ministers of the Murray-Darling Basin governments warned that the window of opportunity to prevent ecological collapse in the Murray's Lower Lakes and the internationally acclaimed Coorong will close in spring.Victoria and the other governments decided to consider the findings of the report after the period the scientists said the Coorong and Lakes would be dead. That is not good enough.
Then yesterday a different study by a panel of ecologists rated the health of 20 of the 23 river valleys in the MurrayDarling Basin as poor or very poor. It said the health of fish populations in more than a third of the 23 rivers was extremely poor.
Today the water level of the Coorong and Lakes is lower than it has been for 7500 years.
Governments, including that of Victoria, need at the very least to assess the various options that might save the
25% of the Coorong that is still functioning.
This area has been one of the world's great wetland systems. It is the ecosystem so many Australians came to know and love through the book and film, Storm Boy and is supposed be protected by international agreements to which Australia is a signatory. Its health is critical to the life of many of our unique waterbirds.
The Narrindjeri people have been sustained by the mixing of the Coorong's fresh and salt waters for thousands of years. Today, thousands of hectares of wetlands in the lower Murray are in danger of turning toxic. In some areas, freshwater has turned to battery acid.
A soil scientist said the only equivalent instance of wetlands turning toxic occurred in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein drained the wetlands to destroy the communities of marsh Arabs.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is asking Victoria and the other Murray-Darling Basin governments to urgently assess options to save the Coorong before the Council of Australian Governments meeting on July 3. There are several options that must be considered before Murray-Darling Basin governments write off the Coorong and Lakes and the wildlife, communities and industries that depend on them.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has suggested the governments look at the feasibility of the following:
â Reducing allocations to irrigators in the Barwon-Darling Rivers (upstream of the Coorong) who now have 300% of their entitlements.
â Releasing some of the 1200 billion litres (three times Melbourne's annual water
use) that is stored in private dams in northern NSW.
â Releasing water from the Menindee Lakes storages on the Darling River.
â Irrigation industries lending water to the environment.
â Reducing irrigation allocations by a small percentage at the start of the season.
Surely the governments of the Murray-Darling Basin have the time and resources available to assess these options to give the Coorong a chance. To date, the response of Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding to this crisis has been disturbing.
On the same day the report on the Coorong and Lower Lakes was made public, Victoria issued a progress report on its Water Plan. The plan's focus is massive pipelines and energy-hungry desalination plants.
The crisis facing the river
that runs along three-quarters of the state's northern
border hardly rates a mention.
Holding told the media that governments hadn't been "sitting on their hands" while the river died. "We've also been returning hundreds of billions of litres of water to the Murray River as part of the Living Murray initiative," he told the ABC.
But the truth is the only water being released to a handful of wetlands in Victoria's threatened red-gum forests was allocated to the Murray in 1987.
Most of the water promised by Victoria to the Murray River under the Living Murray Initiative may never be fully delivered even though it cost Victorian taxpayers $100 million. As part of that agreement, Victoria is required to return 214 billion litres to the Murray by 2009.
About 120 billion litres of this water consists of low-security entitlements that may only be available to the river in very wet years. With science telling us climate change is drying out south-eastern Australia, these years are becoming few and far between. On the Goulburn River, for example, scientists predict this class of water may only be available seven years in every hundred.
Holding refuses to buy back water entitlements from irrigators for the Murray River - even though the Federal Government has set aside $1.2 billion over the next four years to buy back water and return it to the river.
Victoria can and must play a more constructive and co-operative role in bringing the Murray back to life. The COAG meeting on July 3 gives it the perfect opportunity to do so.
Dr Paul Sinclair is the Australian Conservation Foundation's healthy ecosystems program manager.
Chris Hammer
The AgeJune 20, 2008
The report card on the Murray-Darling Basin further illustrates the dire state of Australia's main river system.
THE release yesterday of the first comprehensive audit of the health of the Murray-Darling Basin confirms what most people already guessed the basin's 23 rivers are in a woeful condition.
What the report doesn't spell out is the hard decisions that are looming if the federal and state governments are to have any chance of correcting the situation.
It comes as no surprise that the only river that can be described as in good condition is the Paroo, a largely wild river, mostly untapped for irrigation, flowing across the Queensland border into northern NSW. Nor is it a surprise that rivers in the southern basin are generally in poorer health than those in the north. "Impacts tend to accumulate as you move down southwards in the basin, towards the river mouth," said report author Dr John Harris.
Nowhere have the impacts accumulated as they have in South Australia's lower lakes, which lie at the end of the Murray before it enters the Coorong and the Southern Ocean. Before year's end, federal Water Minister Penny Wong and her state and territory counterparts will need to decide whether the lakes can or should be saved, or whether it would be better to abandon them to the sea.
When the ministers met in March, the lakes were already on life support, barely kept alive on a drip feed of fresh water rationed out from the end of the Murray.
The state of Lake Albert was so bad the ministers authorised $6 million to pump water into it from the larger Lake Alexandrina. This has prevented it evaporating completely and releasing toxic sulphides that would poison the lake whenever it refilled. But it has been a stopgap measure. At the same meeting the ministers asked the Murray-Darling Basin Commission to draw up a list of options for the lakes, to be considered in October or November.
In the meantime, they hoped for heavy autumn and winter rain to solve their dilemma. It wasn't an unreasonable hope: Australia was emerging from a La Nina summer, which in the past has led to wetter-than-average autumns.
But, as we move into winter, the much hoped for rain has failed to materialise. It was the fourth driest autumn in more than 100 years, with a series of scientific papers suggesting permanent changes are occurring to southern Australia's weather systems. This week alone, two separate reports have testified to the parlous state of the Murray-Darling.
"I think there are very good arguments for letting the lower lakes be returned to the sea, to putting the barrages higher up, and dealing somehow with the dairy farms and so forth around the lake," eminent environmentalist Tim Flannery told The Age.
"If we don't make the decision then, in the medium term, nature will make it for us. So either we make it in a controlled way, or nature takes control, and that is the worst option."
Senator Wong was careful to keep her options open this week, declining to rule out opening the barrages or declaring whether she believed the lakes could be saved. These are difficult decisions, affecting those who depend on the lakes for their livelihoods, and the ecology of the waterways themselves.
But a decision will need to be made. The days of deferring hard decisions on the Murray are coming to an end.
An aerial view of the Murray Mouth after a prolonged dry spell.
Photo: David Mariuz
Chris Hammer The Age
June 19, 2008
FEDERAL Water Minister Penny Wong has left open the possibility of allowing fresh water lakes at the mouth of the Murray River to be inundated by sea water.
As a leaked report warned that prolonged drought had left the lakes on the brink of ecological collapse, Senator Wong yesterday twice refused to rule out the option of opening them to the sea.
Water levels at Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert have fallen to half a metre or more below sea level. Salinity levels are rising, and so is the danger of toxic acidity.
When asked if she believed the lower lakes could be saved, the minister declined to give a definitive answer. "Obviously, all of us hope for an end to the drought, because that would benefit the lower lakes and the Coorong," she said.
She was speaking after the leaking of a scientific report that says the long-term reduction of fresh water flowing into the lakes has left them in a parlous ecological state.
The report, from the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin Natural Resource Management Board, was delivered to water ministers last month. It said the decline could only be halted and reversed if substantial amounts of fresh water flowed into the lakes by October.
The report said falling water levels had already had a severe impact on the lakes, including the loss of key species of vegetation, the disconnection and drying of wetlands, and significant decreases in shorebird numbers. "The loss of some native fish species may be permanent," it said.
Senator Wong said she had sought urgent advice on the report from her department. She said the nation's water ministers could make decisions before their next scheduled meeting in November, if the advice required urgent action.
The Australian Greens have called for the release of 450 gigalitres of water from up-river storages through winter and spring.
"(If not) these ecosystems will hit a crucial tipping point beyond which acidity problems will be out of control and the runaway collapse is almost certain," Senator Rachel Siewart said.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has drawn up emergency measures it wants put to a meeting of federal, state and territory leaders in two weeks. They include releasing more water from the Menindee Lakes in NSW, buying water from the Northern Darling River where summer floods topped up storages borrowing water from irrigators, and using emergency amounts of ground water.
"What we need here is not medium-to-long-term solutions, what we need is an emergency response to keep the ecosystems of the lakes from collapse," ACF spokeswoman Arlene Buchan said.
Environment Minister Peter Garrett told Parliament that storages in the lower Murray-Darling were at record lows after the fourth-driest autumn on record. "Management options for the lower lakes are limited," he said.
Nationals MP John Cobb accused the Federal Government of supporting the "theft" of up to 110 gigalitres from the Goulburn Valley to supply Melbourne at a time when the lower lakes were in crisis and irrigators were receiving no water. But Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding said the state would return 214 gigalitres to the river by July next year.
The first report on the health of all 23 of the Murray-Darling catchments will be released today.
June 19, 2008 - 6:55PM; The Age
Australia's largest river system is dangerously degraded and infested with carp, according to a bleak report card.
Just one of the 23 regions that make up the Murray-Darling basin is in good ecological health.
Twenty are in poor or very poor health.
The report card, released on Thursday by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, found exotic carp now make up six kilograms of every 10kg of fish in the river system.
The grim report - the second in as many days pointing to an ecological crisis in the basin - has fuelled calls for emergency action to save the river system.
The federal opposition and the Australian Greens say the basin is fast running out of time.
John Harris, co-author of the commission's report card and senior lecturer at Canberra University's Australian National Biocentre, did not mince words as he unveiled his findings.
"Ecological health is undeniably poor," he said.
"It doesn't come as any surprise at all."
The report card found alien fish - carp, goldfish and the pest gambusia - were getting ahead of native species. Native fish were absent from some sites where they were expected to be inhabiting.
Diversity in the bug and larvae world had decreased.
River health was worst in the basin's south. The Murrumbidgee in southern NSW and the Goulburn Valley were rated worst of a bad lot.
The Paroo valley, in northern NSW, was the lone region in the Murray-Darling to be in good health.
"Water resource development" was blamed for the system's poor health, although the drought has not helped.
Opposition water spokesman Greg Hunt said the federal government should cease delays and spend more on conserving water.
Greens water spokeswoman Rachel Siewert said the report card should shock the government into action.
She called for an immediate release of water this winter, and for government water buy-backs to be sped up.
"It is obvious what is needed now is a much more radical approach than the government is currently planning," Senator Siewert said.
Water Minister Penny Wong said the report card was sobering, but the government was taking steps to deal with the problem.
"This audit highlights the serious problems in the Murray-Darling Basin caused by climate change, drought and over-allocation after 11 years of inaction by the previous government," she said.
"The Rudd government is taking action to restore the rivers to health, with $3.1 billion committed to buying back water for basin waterways."
Senator Wong said the first $50 million of the fund had already been spent securing 35 billion litres of water - meaning the rivers would get a greater share of water when it rains.
The government has also set aside $5.8 million to fix leaky irrigation systems, and was setting a new cap on water extractions, she said.
Meanwhile, irrigators denied they were to blame for the Murray-Darling's parlous state.
NSW Irrigators' Council chief executive Andrew Gregson said NSW water allocations were at zero or just above - so farmers were not taking much water out of the river.
"The problem hasn't been caused by anyone taking too much water - the problem has been caused by no water being available in the first instance," he said.
June 18, 2008 AAP
A new scientific report warns parts of the lower Murray River may be beyond recovery without water by October.
But the Rudd Government has deferred consideration of the report until a meeting of the Murray-Darling Ministerial Council in November.
The report, prepared by a scientific panel and leaked to the ABC, warns there are six months to save crucial parts of the Murray-Darling Basin.
Without sufficient water, ecosystem recovery may take years to decades and the unique ecology of the lower Murray will be irreversibly lost, it says.
Vegetation on the lower Murray had been lost and wetlands were dry while some fish species might already be extinct.
Dr Arlene Buchan, healthy rivers campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said that waiting until November could be detrimental to the system.
"You don't often hear a scientist using language of this strength," she told ABC Radio today.
"They're being crystal clear about the need for water, the short period of time, the urgency of the problem and the consequences of not acting.
"What the ministerial council have done is ignore the urgency that is portrayed by these scientists.
"They have more or less made a decision about the lower lakes and the Coorong by not making a decision to return water to them."
University of Adelaide ecologist Associate Professor David Paton said some fresh water lakes were on the verge of bring unrecognisable.
"As far as I am concerned there has been 10 years at least that people have said you have got to restore the environmental flows to the system if you wish to keep the natural assets," he told ABC radio.
"We have failed to do that. Now we should be seriously trying to repair the damage and at least prevent it going to the point where when we do have water back, which might be two or three years away, you are just not going to have a system that you can recover."
There were suggestions coming from some in South Australia that Lake Albert may never be freshwater again.
"The writing is on the wall," Prof Paton said.
"Lakes Albert and Alexandrina and even the Coorong might be very different systems to what they have been throughout the 20th century."
AAP
June 18, 2008 - 5:54PM AAP
The parched Murray-Darling has started to die, turning into acid capable of burning human flesh.
A leaked scientific report to governments has warned parts of the river system - particularly the lower lakes - is on its last legs.
Mike Young, professor of water economics at the University of Adelaide, says parts of the Murray-Darling Basin were becoming acidic as underwater soils became exposed to the sun.
"If you put your hands in it you get burnt," Prof Young told AAP.
"This is sulfuric acid."
"Once you get to there, then there's no turning back. Those systems are now dead forever."
Prof Young joined environmental groups and political parties on Wednesday in calling for governments to dramatically speed up efforts to save the Murray-Darling.
The basin, Australia's main irrigation zone, stretches from southern Queensland through NSW and Victoria and into South Australia.
The report by the Natural Resource Management Board of the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin set an October deadline on action to return water to the rivers.
But federal and state water ministers are not due to meet until November - sparking criticism they are moving too slowly on the crisis.
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said it was outrageous the federal government would do nothing about the report for months.
"The government's missing in action when it comes to the greatest river system in this country and the urgent need for action," he said.
Opposition water spokesman Greg Hunt called for an emergency meeting of governments.
"We need the ministers to come together now, not in four, five, six or seven months," he said.
But federal Water Minister Penny Wong said governments were ready to take action to save the Murray-Darling, and she was actively looking at ways to tackle the problems outlined in the report.
"I have asked for urgent advice on what we can do in the short term," she said.
Ms Wong said action in response to the report had not been deferred until November.
"If urgent decisions need to be made by the ministerial council, that can occur out of session," she said.
Senator Wong said the federal government appreciated the urgency of the situation. She noted the $3.1 billion buy-back of irrigation water had already begun.
Prof Young said state governments and irrigators were dragging their feet on returning water to the Murray-Darling, not the federal government.
However, he said the water buy-backs were progressing far too slowly.
"It has to be moving much faster than currently planned," he said.
Links : 20/06/08 Murray-Darling may be dead before States act, Paul Sinclair, ACF The Age , Opinion
June 16, 2008 - 9:29PM
The Murrumbidgee region in southern NSW is using an "extremely high" amount of its shrinking water resources, scientists say.
The cereal-growing region - which includes Canberra and Griffith and has a population of half a million - has 53 per cent of its surface water "under development".
The finding is contained in a CSIRO report on the Murrumbidgee's water resources, issued as part of a series on the parched Murray-Darling Basin.
"This is an extremely high level of development," the report said.
If the recent dry climate continued, surface water availability in the Murrumbidgee region would drop by 30 per cent and end-of-system flow by almost half.
However, the CSIRO is tipping the drought will ease somewhat in the long-term.
Water Minister Penny Wong said the report would be used to develop a new and sustainable limit on how much water could be taken out of the Murray-Darling, which includes the Murrumbidgee region.
"The report released today on the Murrumbidgee region demonstrates the effects of climate change on our water supplies and highlights the need to use water wisely," Ms Wong said.
Australian Conservation Foundation healthy rivers campaigner Arlene Buchan said the report showed climate change would decimate inflows to the Murrumbidgee River.
The federal government must fast-track its $3.1 billion Murray-Darling buy-back to save the river, Dr Buchan said.
"With climate change drying out much of south-eastern Australia we can no longer afford to keep extracting so much water from these rivers," she said.