“A Neo-Mesopotamian Desertification Project”, or “Murphy’s Murray-Darling Political Watering Hole”, or “How to waste 14 Billion Dollars and be Rich”.
by Jacob Jonker., Auckland, NZ.
Water is life. In the Nile delta, for thousands of years unto the present, the Egyptians have relied on the annual flood to water their grain fields by means of a clever irrigation system. This civilisation was able to develop in the first instance due to a regular supply of a staple food, with surplus from good years to tide them over when the Nile flood was lower than usual. Then, the next requirement was, and is, an annual surplus in food which those engaged in the growing of it were, and are, able to deliver to the rest of society. Without that surplus to feed the people, building and maintaining a sociopolitical system, there would be no civilisation to speak of. There would at most be an agrarian society with a cultural flourish.
The Egyptian economy of water is replicated everywhere. Except under very favourable circumstances, responsible water management is the key to make civilised life a possibility. Before the Egyptians, there may have been other civilisations. Since, civilisations have come and gone, starting with responsible water management and sustainable agricultural practices and fading or failing due to a variety of reasons, but often failing due to irresponsible and unsustainable management of water and land. Sociopolitical life, its development, growth and flourishing, and its subsequent decay being often because of mismanagement of water and land. The knowledge of cause and effect relating to the decline of civilisations is no secret, yet, the lessons which we in our day and age may learn from known history in that regard are, on the evidence available to us, too often ignored.
One Herman Lambooij wrote a book about the development of water management in the northern part of North Holland, centred on a region called Westfriesland, a region defined by a ringdam, or dijk, within which the drainage of the land started in earnest around the 12th century and the struggles which ensued due to the conflicting interests of the many land owners and other concerned individuals were said to have led to early forms of local democratic governing bodies which, today, are the “Waterschappen”, more centralised and governed from on high, despite the nominally democratic structure still extant. There is a lesson here, too. Democracy is not as stable as many people still imagine it to be. It answers to the ever-changing array of diverse influences with an everchanging equilibrium. Now, borrowing from Shakespeare, there’s the rub.
To an article by one knowledgeable about water management in Australia, a Bill Johnston, in the Quadrant Magazine of March 19 last week, titled “The Murray-Darling Plan’s $14B Farce. The B denotes billion.
(The Murray-Darling Plan’s $14B Farce – Quadrant)
With some justification, one might indeed call this expensive scam, sorry, scheme, a schemozzle.
I remember reading about it maybe several decades ago, at the start of it – at least the publicity part of it, which, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg slowly emerging from the politically troubled waters of the nation’s life, after the chains anchoring this behemoth to the murky, unseen, and to most of us unknown bottom of the harbour grounds where policies have their beginnings, are slowly loosened.
The mainstream media is ever obliging, for reasons of commercial prudence, let’s say, to judiciously measure out the right narrative accompanied by a backdrop historical interpretation and future prognostications calculated to make the wider public think well of the plans revealed so far, while those directly affected but not part of the design of the scheme are lulled into a false sense of security, or given that a number of these latter also-rans in the business of politics are bound to be sceptical, or even alarmed, suitable noises are made from diverse quarters influential upon these, now potential victims – potential victims of a change in how the government deals with ultra-national interests operating within the national political economy.
In this case, one gathers it was not the family farmers owning water rights in the MurrayDarling basin who were clamouring to be bought out, or the taxpayers who were clamouring for yet another government scheme to facilitate the greater ballooning of the gross national money supply, already quite gross as it is.
Hydrologically speaking, much of the new arrangements don’t add up. That was on the cards when the scheme was mooted. No problem for the punters who stood to collect upon the pains of the looted.
“However this plan has become highly controversial due to irrigators losing large amounts of water that they “own” effecting many people socially and economically as well. “
From a strictly economic perspective, common sense tells us (us, who lay claim to such rare quality) that the interests of the nation have not been served as well as it could have with this scheme. That, perhaps, the interests of the nation would have been much better served by a different scheme of arrangement. Leave well alone, if well it was, is common sense, but not so common nowadays.
Sociopolitically, it is too early to tell whether, overall, the damage done herewith exceeds by a considerable, not-to-be-ignored margin, any possible benefits which may be had from the public knowledge about it.
Water makes bread, which is the stuff of life. Using your loaf in a business environment is therefore essential. Using our loaf in a democratic environment is just as crucial, if we are to survive as a society. But there’s the rub. We are many societies all at once, and none.
To be or not to be, a society. We need to make our minds up on that, soon!
Jacob’s views are supported by a review by the federal inspector general of water compliance, Troy Grant, announced on Wednesday 22 April 2026.
Reporting on the findings, the Guardian says that :
“Two state governments have drastically underdelivered more than $160m in infrastructure measures to improve river health in the northern Murray-Darling basin eight years since they were promised, a major independent review has found.
This includes failure by the New South Wales government to secure any of the private land access needed to improve water flows over floodplains in the state’s Gwydir region, where scientists had to scramble to rescue turtles in dried up wetlands last week.
A separate NSW government project to install passages to help fish migrate around barriers in waterways has delivered just 64km (3%) of the original 2,135km target, with the target later reduced to 589km.
In Queensland, promised refurbishments and upgrades to weirs also never proceeded past the feasibility stage.”
“Quite simply the environment is the loser along with the taxpayer,” Grant told Guardian Australia.
See the report here: https://storage.googleapis.com/files-au-climate/igwc/p/prj31526a7d2023993b5ae42/page/NBTK_Inquiry_Report_Final_ACCESSIBLE_PDF_22Apr2026_.pdf
Thanks, Allan. Nice to know. I’ll check it out.
Will the report have any beneficial effects? I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
So, I had a look at the report on the northern Murray-Darling basin bureaucratic boondoggle. I have never had an interest in red tape, but have always tried to not get entangled. I understand, nevertheless, bureaucracy has a history going back at least three thousand years, and more. Without that, no civilisation worth remembering. Now:
Important though these reports are, for the stakeholders, the current and future taxpayers-ratepayers-citizens would be well-served not only by an inquiry detailing the structural political defects which have led to the preventable wastage and inefficiencies, but also by a right Royal Commission looking into the aetiology of this entire scheme. A thorough look that is instituted expressly to prevent it being a whitewash. Such a thing could be a long time coming. Unrelated to any back room dealings:
The federal-versus-state rights to rule and mal-distribution of responsibilities need to be addressed by and by, but my impression is that the onset of this saga was possibly about gaining (monopoly?) control of the precious water rights, rather than first-off a bureaucratic initiative or ecological idealists clamouring for taxpayer-funded action with partisan aims in mind. However, the Peter principle is not confined to bureaucracy or tax-ratepayer largesse. Hence, to see where the money flows and why, interested folk need to widen their political horizons.
Whatever: In the greater scheme of things, such management in an Australia-wide context could be done by a dictatorial regime which would likely turn most of the country into a desert waste, or, alternatively, one could be looking at the real beginning of mankind micro-managing nature within a timeframe of hunderds of years and with remarkable effect and remarkable, though not necessarily advantageous, side-effects. I hope for the micro-management, as the notion of giving nature its due liberty will not be an option until humanity is, again, reduced to living as stone age peoples once did.
It would be impossible Jacob to uncover the origins of this mess, without an exhaustive research project, and then it would eb futile because of the unique skill of politicians to be unaccountable. I suspect your suggestion that “possibly about gaining monopoly” is close to the truth. Either by an industry or a government. Somewhere along the line, like the line in Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down, they forget that it is not their property and they have become “lost somewhere, somehow, along the way.”
It’s pretty pathetic that a government bill is required before water can flow to where it is needed.According to the Guardian:
Water flows to parched New South Wales wetlands where an urgent rescue mission to save dying wildlife unfolded are a step closer to resuming after legislation passed the state parliament’s upper house.
The water minister, Rose Jackson, told the parliament on Thursday night the impact of a halt to environmental flows in the internationally significant Gwydir region had been “devastating” as she introduced legislative amendments she said would allow flows to resume.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/08/water-flows-nsw-wetlands-drought-gwydir-australia
Where do the almond farmers get their water from, I wonder. There is no suggestion that I can see, that they, too, have to give up some of their entitlements. Other farmers, by which I mean arable and livestock farmers, rather than nut growers, would be justified in asking exactly how nut growers got their privileged entitlements, other than on the basis of temporary higher returns per acre at the expense of the environment and everybody else. For maximum sustainable utilisation of farmland, livestock and grain farming should be combined with nut farming and tree growing for special and general environmental purposes. This would not suit the corporate landholders. Hence, the future is likely the creation of a great sandy desert in the entire interior of Australia rather than ever-greater micro-management in which each eco zone is dedicated to a variable mix use of the land by which rainfall and sustainability are vouchsafed; let’s say a broadacre permaculture system with nature reserves set aside. This could be, but must not, in the unlikely event, a bureaucratic nightmare for landholders, but the patently obvious should be easy to implement, after political lobbying, financial/economic inducements by the corporates for politicians, bureaucrats and scientists to do the corporate stakeholders’ bidding, and other corruption in government, are made punishable by law and strictly policed and enforced. Hmm, good luck with that one. Not a betting person, but my money would be on an accelerated landgrab by the multinationals to squeeze every bit of profit from the land before it succumbs, and then make the people of Australia pay for the long road back to reclaim the greater Australian man-made desert (You read it here first).
As everybody now knows, wholesale clearing in most of Australia’s (and similar) climate zones leads to an accelerated reduction in rainfall overall, with occasional extreme rainfall events.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that Sir Sidney Kidman had already realised as such. Possibly read it in “The Cattle King”, by Ion L. Idriess. Also, in 1865 George Goyder established in South Australia what was named Goyder’s Line, beyond which it was uneconomical to break the sod for crops. Well, illegal clearing should be punished seriously, not so lightly that it is profitable to pay the fine. And pigs might fly.
If New Zealand is Alice’s wonderland, what to call Australia, the lucky country? The Unlucky Country?
Interesting observation Jacob. You are talking about the equity of the situation. In the sense of fairness and equalness. Equity is lost when vested interests influence decision making, particularly at government level. It is a form of corruption.
In my book “The Vandemonian: Wall Street and Silicon Valley Collide” in a preamble about Australia before colonisation I say, “In other words, they observed how nature sustained itself, and then duplicated those methods. Europeans ignored all of that and brought European plants, animals and farming methods to this resistant, still defiant land.” (https://www.bigskypublishing.com.au/the-vandemonian/)
Your comment made me think of something else. For me growing nuts is growing trees. Growing livestock is cutting down trees, and adding methane. One helps the planet, one does not. On another site I say, “At school we all learned that an apple a day kept the doctor away, and again in my further examination of the truth of that, I learned that the one food source you can actually live on is not apples but beans.” That same research way back then also said the best thing instead of apples is nuts, to not cause carries, not cause bowel cancer, keep a fresh breath when you talk with the teacher. (https://allanbranch.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1112&action=edit)