Are we there yet? The Murray-Darling Basin and sustainable water management

Abstract

In 2007, then Australian Prime Minister Howard said of the Murray-Darling Basin’s rivers that action was required to end the ‘The tyranny of incrementalism and the lowest common denominator’ governance to prevent ‘economic and environmental decline’. This paper explores the management of these rivers as an epicentre for three key debates for the future of Australia. Information on biodiversity, analyses of the socio-ecological system, and climate change projections are presented to illustrate the disjunction between trends in environmental health and the institutions established to manage the Basin sustainably. Three key debates are considered: (1) conflict over the allocation of water between irrigated agriculture versus a range of other ecosystem services as the latest manifestation of the debate between adherents of the pioneering myth versus advocates of limits to growth in Australia; (2) cyclical crises as a driver of reactive policy reform and the prospects of the 2008 Water Act forming the basis of proactive, adaptive management of emerging threats and opportunities; and (3) subsidiarity in governance of the environment and natural resources in the Australian federation. Implementation of the 2012 Basin Plan as promised by the Federal Government ‘in full and on time’ is a key sustainability test for Australia. Despite Australian claims of exceptionalism, the Murray-Darling Basin experience mirrors the challenges faced in managing rivers sustainably and across governance scales in federations around the world.

Keywords

conflict federal governance Murray-Darling Basin policy subsidiarity water

The Murray-Darling Basin

In its dryness, Australia suggests the planet’s future, as the vast human population and the demands of its industries intensify competition for an unchanging quantity of freshwater; in water terms, Australia is a warning. (Leslie, 2005: 227)

The Murray-Darling Basin (the Basin) does not have one of the world’s longest rivers, nor is it large by water volume, nor are its aquatic ecosystems especially biodiverse. Yet the Basin’s extreme hydrological variability, location in the climatically testing mid-latitudes, and misfortune to cross five states and territories in a wealthy, federal nation make this Basin an extreme test of sustainable river basin management (Grafton et al., 2014).

This paper explores the management of the Basin’s river as an epicentre for three key debates for the future of Australia, namely: (1) conflict over the allocation of water between irrigated agriculture versus a range of other ecosystem services as the latest manifestation of the debate between adherents of the pioneering myth versus advocates of limits to growth in Australia; (2) cyclical crises as a driver of reactive policy reform and the prospects of the 2008 Water Act forming the basis of proactive, adaptive management of emerging threats and opportunities; and (3) subsidiarity in governance of the environment and natural resources in the Australian federation. From this discussion, lessons for sustainable governance of other rivers will be drawn.

The context of the Basin

Covering nearly a seventh of the Australian continent, the Basin is divided into a semi-arid, summer rainfall-dominated northern Darling River catchment and a temperate River Murray catchment in the south (Figure 1). The Basin has the traditional land and waters of 34 indigenous nations (MDBA, 2010). Following European occupation, these indigenous peoples were substantially dispossessed as the land and waters were increasing exploited for agriculture. By the late 1990s water storages were in operation that could hold around three times the river system’s average natural flow to the sea (see Figure 2), and the diversion of water for irrigation resulted in severe environmental impacts (Pittock, 2016). This degradation includes: desiccation of wetland ecosystems; significant declines in fish, water birds and other species; reductions in water quality due to increased salinity, acidification and cyannobacteria blooms; and times of closure of the Murray Mouth (see Figure 3).

Figure 1.

Location of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, illustrating that it falls within the territories of four states and the Australian Capital Territory. © Clive Hilliker, The Australian National University.

Figure 2.

Total dam storage capacity in the Murray-Darling Basin compared to average natural flows to the sea, system inflows and annual water consumption (Leblanc et al., 2012).

Figure 3.

Bottle Bend lagoon, River Murray floodplain, NSW, showing the effects of desiccation, salinization and acidification. © J. Pittock.

The Basin now supplies water to two million residents, as well as a further million people outside the Basin. Around 90 per cent of the water diverted in the Basin is used in irrigated agriculture, generating around AUD $5.5 billion in produce per year (MDBA, 2010). Around 5 per cent of the Basin’s area is wetland, supporting extensive biodiversity, including 16 Ramsar wetland sites of international importance (Pittock et al., 2010). The socio-economic importance and the degradation of ecosystems have kept Basin management at the forefront of national debates.

Changes in Basin management

In the debates on federation of Australia the management of the Basin was one of the most contentious issues (Connell, 2007). As the most downstream jurisdiction, South Australia sought stronger Federal Government powers to regulate this transboundary river system in the belief that it would constrain water extraction by upstream states and guarantee construction of ship locks for river transport. A consequence was the adoption of the ambiguous section 100 of the Australian Constitution that states ‘The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation’ (Australian Government, 2012). The meaning of the words ‘reasonable’ and ‘conservation’ in this context have not been tested, resulting in the Federal Government advancing reforms only with the concurrence of the states.

A plethora of institutional change has ensued, often provoked by drought. These include: formation of the River Murray Commission by three states and the Federal Government from 1915; formation of the consensus based Murray-Darling Basin Authority by five states and territories, and the Federal Government, along with the 1994 cap on surface water diversion entitlements; establishment of markets for water entitlements from the late 1990s; the 2004 National Water Initiative principles for governance; and the Water Act and Basin Plan from 2008 (Connell, 2007, 2011a).

Prime Minister John Howard introduced the Murray-Darling Basin reforms in 2007 by declaring: ‘nothing can change the basic facts of our continent’ in terms of hydrological variability and water scarcity, stating that action was needed to end the ‘tyranny of incrementalism and the lowest common denominator’ governance. He proposed ‘once and for all’ reforms to prevent ‘economic and environmental decline’ (Howard, 2007). The 2008 reforms were driven by the millennium drought and saw the Federal Government establish the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and assert its right to set ‘sustainable diversion limits’ for water (Connell and Grafton, 2011a). The Federal Government drew on provisions in the Australian constitution to legislate for ‘external affairs’ (section 51(xxix)) and for ‘trade and commerce’ (section 98) (Australian Government, 2012). To apply the external affairs power the government stated its intention to implement Australian obligations under two environmental treaties, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

Australian authorities have often promoted Murray-Darling Basin governance as a global example of excellence. For instance, in 2004 the World Bank was advised that: ‘Australia has adopted an integrated catchment (watershed) management approach…The institutional arrangements…are still evolving, but represent one of the most highly developed models anywhere’ (Haisman, 2004: i). Indeed, the institutional arrangements were evolving, for in 2007 the ‘management by consensus’ approach of the federal and state governments was dumped when the Federal Government asserted primacy in setting water management limits through a new federal Water Act (Connell and Grafton, 2011b). More recently, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering opined: ‘The Basin Plan should be viewed as the start of an ambitious journey and recognised as a world-leading example of large basin-scale water planning. Many of the world’s large water basins face severe water security challenges and very few have attempted what is now being implemented in the Murray-Darling Basin’ (Vertessy, 2018).

So, are we there yet? Is Australia on a path to sustainable management of the Murray-Darling Basin? Progress is mixed and there are worrying signs that key objectives will not be achieved at the end of the current Basin Plan term in 2026. There are a number of institutional changes that improve transparency and water governance, including nationalizing water accounting within the Bureau of Meteorology and management of reallocated water by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (Connell, 2011b). The market in entitlements has enabled water to easily move from low to higher value uses, promoting greater efficiency in use and reducing the socio-economic impacts of drought (Grafton and Horne, 2014). The Plan and associated programs are intended to reallocate 3200 GL/yr in average water yield from irrigation farming to restore freshwater ecosystems.

However, the reallocation of water is not enough to restore key wetland ecosystems, and recovery has plateaued at around 2000 GL/yr (Pittock et al., 2010; WGCS, 2017). Further, no increase in end-of-river flows are apparent (Grafton, 2017), and key targets are not being met, including export of salt to the sea, or an increase in water bird numbers (WGCS, 2017). The Federal Government has invested AUD $13 billion (around USD $9 billion) in programs to implement water reforms in the Basin but this expenditure has been poorly directed, in particular, into subsidies for more water efficient irrigation infrastructure that may be having perverse effects (Grafton, 2017). Despite the availability of high quality climate change projections, no allowance has been made to adapt to changes in water availability (Young et al., 2011; Pittock, 2013). Of further concern is the apparent winding back of key measures, for example, with 675 GL/yr (of 3200 GL/yr) of reallocation of real water from irrigation to river ecosystems being replaced by off-set projects of questionable efficacy (WGCS, 2017; Long, 2018).

What then can we make of the evolution of the former Prime Minister’s ‘once and for all’ reforms of Murray-Darling Basin management to prevent ‘economic and environmental decline’, backed by billions of dollars and new national institutions, into just another compromise that may fail the test of a severe drought and climate change? Here, the contested management of the Basin can be seen as an epicentre of three great debates on Australia’s management of the environment and natural resources.

Three great national debates

Australia’s evolution as a federal nation born from occupation and colonization on a continent with a highly variable environment has generated three great national debates on sustainability that play out in the Basin. First, there is the question of whether Australian society still holds to a pioneering myth versus appreciation that there are natural resource limits to economic growth. Second, in this federal system of government there is the question of subsidiarity, namely, what roles should different levels of government play in managing the environment and natural resources sustainably. Third, can we rise above crisis management to be better stewards of our environment and natural resources.

The pioneering myth versus limits to growth

Australia was occupied and developed a pioneering myth to justify the establishment of the nation. Bolton (1981) observed that the bush ‘was seen by most Australian settlers as a potentially hostile environment which must be tamed into conformity with their economic goals’. This myth was adopted and foster by Australia’s governments. Lines (1991: 144) concluded that ‘Under the highly visible hand of the state, the ideology of development became an integral part of Australian nationhood, continuing, and ensuring for the future, an unvarying commitment to the conquest of nature.’ This pioneering myth can be seen in words of former prime ministers who promoted the development of the Murray-Darling Basin, leading to over-exploitation of its water resources. At the May 1920 Premiers Conference, Prime Minister Billy Hughes proclaimed (Powell, 1993: 55): ‘I say deliberately that the possibilities of the Murray are not less than those of the Nile. I see no reason whatever why, in the valley of the Murray, there should not ultimately be as great a population is there is in the valley of the Nile’ (populations now: Nile basin = 320 million people, Murray-Darling Basin = 2 million). Prime Minister Robert Menzies said in July 1958 that: ‘The valley of the Murray was made for irrigation; and nobody could miss seeing it’ (Powell, 1993).

While it might seem like common sense that the amount of water that can be extracted is finite, recognition of the limits to growth was first evident in the decision of the state and federal governments to cap surface water entitlements at 1994 levels (Connell, 2007). The proposal in the Basin Plan and associated agreements to reduce surface water diversion by 3200 GL/yr on average acknowledged that limits had been exceeded. Yet, as Huitema and Meijerink (2010) conclude, changes in water management paradigms remain at risk from advocates of the former regime.

Rejection of limits to growth has been expressed in two ways in the Basin. The least sophisticated have been efforts by some industry and political leaders to reduce environmental water allocations in the Basin. This was expressed most crudely by the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, Barnaby Joyce, who declared: ‘We have taken water, put it back into agriculture, so we could look after you [farmers] and make sure we don’t have the greenies running the show’ (Chan, 2017). Efforts by technocrats to apply more and more reductive science and engineering interventions to argue that less water is needed to sustain a desired level of biodiversity have been more effective and is evident in a number of guises. Rather than enabling managed floods to sustain freshwater ecosystems, government agencies have been re-engineering floodplains to manually move and pond water. These ‘environmental works and measures’ purport to conserve biodiversity with less water, measures challenged by many researchers (Pittock et al., 2012; Bond et al., 2014). Measures to substitute non-water conservation measures, such as installation of fish ladders on dams, in place of water reallocation are similarly contested (WGCS, 2017). Of most concern are efforts of government agencies to use uncertainty in volumes required to sustain ecosystem attributes as an opportunity to adopt the least certain environmental water allocation level (WGCS, 2012; Colloff, 2018). This conflation of science and values has been criticized as diminishing the significance of social, cultural and political dimensions in decision-making on water for the environment (Capon and Capon, 2017).

This rejection by some stakeholders of limits to water exploitation is unlikely to be restored to its former pre-eminence, as the Federal Government continues to promise implementation of the 2012 Basin Plan (Hannum, 2018) ‘in full and on time’. However, the compromises that have been adopted, such as the 675 GL/yr reallocation of real water to off-set projects (Long, 2018), increases the prospect of the Basin Plan failing to achieve its objectives, triggering the need for further policy interventions.

Subsidiarity in governance

By default, governance of natural resources is primarily a state responsibility under the Australian Constitution. Yet resources that cross political boundaries require management at different scales of governance and need to be harmonized with adjoining jurisdictions. It took the Australian federation until 2008 to pass laws that asserted the role of the Federal Government in setting some basic standards for sustainably managing freshwater ecosystems across a basin occupying a seventh of the continent, and even then it required use of indirect mandates under the external affairs and trade powers. This is an example of subsidiarity, the concept that a central authority should perform only those activities which cannot be performed well at a more local level.

Given the widely varying circumstances of each of the 19 regions or tributary valleys within the Murray-Darling Basin, better management can only occur when regional communities are enabled with the responsibility and opportunity to identify locally contextual ways of meeting basin-wide objectives. Only such governance can bring access to local knowledge, resources and ownership for more sustainable management. In the Basin, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and federal Natural Heritage Trust programs played important roles in the 1990s and 2000s by enabling regional natural resource management and catchment management authorities to bring diverse stakeholders together for more cooperative management (MDBMC, 2001; Robins, 2007).

Globally, formal establishment of this fourth tier of governance at the catchment scale has been fraught, as ambitious proposals for these institutions are torn down by competing national and state agencies (Garrick et al., 2014). These trends are evident in the Basin, where centralization of resources has seen a diminution of local community engagement and regional governance institutions (Robins and Kanowski, 2011). The change of roles of water managers from the later 1990s from being advocates of water use for irrigation to regulators for more equal access to water from environmental and other users – a change in role from coach to umpire – has diminished some support from some rural industries for Basin management initiatives (Connell, 2007).

Further, while the 1988–2007 consensus model of governance among the state and federal governments risked slow and lowest common denominator decision-making, adopted policies were generally implemented (Connell, 2007). Centralization of governance to the Federal Government has seen state governments withdraw funding from collaborative programs and more vigorously contest basin policy decisions.

This history raises the question of how we can govern such a large river basin better by applying subsidiarity. International research suggests that the most persistent and effective catchment management bodies have enabling legislation, a democratic mandate from local residents, some level of direct revenue from local fees and an adaptive management approach (Pittock, 2009). There are proposals to reinvigorate regional governance in Australia based on these principles (WGCS, 2014). Examination of Australian national policies suggests that the few that are effective are: established in a bipartisan manner through the Council of Australian Governments; subject to oversight by an independent authority; include independent and transparent auditing; and decide upon performance payments to state governments for effective implementation (Pittock et al., 2015). These conditions occur rarely and are catalysed by crises.

Crises as a driver of policy reform – Can we do better?

The history of water management reforms in the Basin has been driven by crises – droughts, floods and cyanobacteria blooms – only for these programs to be ignored or undermined in subsequent good years (Connell, 2007). This poor approach to risk for drought management has been termed the ‘hydro-illogical cycle’ (Wilhite, 2011). While cyclical crises are a driver of reactive policy reform, can Australia do better?

One approach is to better harness crises. Huitema and Meijerink (2010) argue for fostering water policy entrepreneurs, arguing that:

disasters or other ‘shock events’ may provide the most important impetus for policy change […] policy change in many cases has to be prepared in advance, and this is done by individuals who work hard to develop and sell alternative approaches. […] the role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ […] is crucial if we want to develop a more systematic approach to adaptability that is less dependent on shock events to trigger transitions.

This approach considers a number of events as policy reform opportunities, namely: droughts and floods, severe pollution, water scarcity, changes of government, changes of leaders and financial crises. They argue that innovative and persistent policy entrepreneurs may come from politics, business, community, government or the academic sectors. Identifying and sustaining these entrepreneurs is needed to sustain reform. In Australia, the philanthropic sector is exploring how to support such policy entrepreneurship. An alternative approach is to manufacture policy reform windows. Policies and plans that have mandatory renewal dates are one way of rejuvenating reforms ‘out of cycle’. In the case of the Basin Plan, it is scheduled to be revised every ten years; however, the Australian Parliament extended the first review period to 14 years.

Environmental and socio-economic changes are going to trigger the need to revisit Basin management institutions. The direct and indirect impacts of climate change are one example. CSIRO projections suggest that water availability in the Basin may be up to 7 per cent greater or 37 per cent less by 2030, changes that are not provided for in the Basin Plan (CSIRO, 2008; Pittock, 2013). A number of the societal responses to climate change can have perverse impacts on water availability (Pittock et al., 2013). For instance, modelling of afforestation of 10 per cent of the catchment headwaters of the over-allocated Macquarie River catchment suggests that run-off into the river could be reduced by 17 per cent (Herron et al., 2002). While these emerging impacts will be difficult to manage, they do create opportunities to advance reform water management in the Basin.

Conclusion

The Murray-Darling Basin is an important case study of a nation struggling to manage water in a complex river system sustainably. The challenges mirror those faced in managing rivers sustainably and across governance scales in federations around the world (Garrick et al., 2014). Crisis-driven management saw the former Prime Minister in 2007 propose ‘once and for all’ reforms of Basin management to prevent ‘economic and environmental decline’. Yet Australia has once more lapsed into the ‘hydro-illogical cycle’; compromise and resistance has set in, setting the scene for a future crisis to trigger further reform.

The Basin is an epicentre for three key debates for the future of Australia. The conflict over the allocation of water continues contestation between adherents of the pioneering myth versus advocates of limits to growth in Australia. Subsidiarity in governance of the environment and natural resources in the Basin waxed from the 1990s and has waned since 2008. Cyclical crises continue to drive reactive policy reform.

There are opportunities for Australian society to rise above these debates. In sowing the seeds of future crises, flawed Basin Plan implementation creates the opportunities for reform. The principles for better institutions for catchment and Basin water management are known. The water policy entrepreneurs in Australia have the potential to promote reform when the circumstances allow.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This presentation draws on some ideas from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and professors Richard Baker and Alastair Greig.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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