Retelling Australia’s water story (Grafton, 2024)

Chris Perry

Grafton Grafton, Q. 2024. Retelling Australia’s water story. Monash University Publishing. ISBN 9781922979902, 96 p., AUD $19.95.

(URL: https://publishing.monash.edu/product/retelling-australias-water-story/

Chris Perry

chrisjperry@me.com

To cite this Review: Perry, C. 2025. Review of "Retelling Australia’s water story". Monash University Publishing, 2024, by Quentin GraftonWater Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/381-retelling

 

This short book, published in Monash University’s “In the National Interest” series, weaves a compelling and almost entirely depressing story from three separate strands: 

First, the expropriation of Australia’s water resources by colonial settlers, starting in the late 1700s, without regard to the fundamental importance water to the relationship that Australia’s First Peoples had developed with the natural environment over the previous 65,000 years;

Second, the failure of the vast majority (all?) of water projects undertaken as “Nation Building” enterprises over the subsequent by the colonists to meet their planned objectives (in physical outcomes and/or cost).

Third, the impotence of regulatory authorities—once the failures of performance and the associated impacts on the environment had been recognised—to enforce corrective measures that would reallocate water to deprived uses and users, including the environment, due to political interference and regulatory capture.

This is not the history that Australia’s water authorities project to the world.  Indeed their preferred history is defended quite vigorously: in 2017 a draft FAO report reviewing international experience in upgrading irrigation technology around the world, including a brief but critical section on the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) based on published literature. Australian authorities objected and insisted on a revised version which was unreferenced and contrary to the published literature. The compromise was to remove any reference to Australia in FAO’s report—effectively, censorship.

Despite persistent doubts as to appropriateness of recent investment programs in the MDB, for many water specialists, Australia is proposed as a model, having been the first country to introduce large-scale water markets that seemed to allow resilience to drought, with production falling by a far smaller fraction than water supplies as transfers took place from lower to higher value users.  Indeed elements of the Australian experience, and the MDB system in particular are noteworthy and important to international experience: unbundling land and water rights; allowing trade and sale of water entitlements; definition of differing reliabilities associated with specific entitlements; publication of detailed prices for water by location, time and duration of entitlement; alternative routes to “recovering” water for alternative uses—buy-back of rights versus improved infrastructure; metered supply to the farm level (at least in some areas), etc, etc. The MDB offers important lessons for all these topics, which are frequently advocated elsewhere as part of “reform” programs. .  

But…

As Grafton eloquently documents, since the water (a) was originally expropriated without compensation from its customary users; (b) was subsequently over-allocated to settlers, such that serious environmental damage has resulted, in contravening “laws” enacted to protect the environment; and (c) is now apparently beyond regulation as a result of vested interests and regulatory capture and the emergence of a “hydrocracy”. The overall picture painted is one of failure.

As a read, the book is often quite dense with examples of billions of litres of water stored, transferred, or over-exploited, and brief histories of many projects. That said, while the divergence from planned outcomes is rarely clear, the sheer number of examples successfully lays the basis for the need to “Retell the Story”.

In conclusion, Grafton advocates for a broader political approach to addressing the current situation, most particularly through involvement of all stakeholders including the First Peoples’ representatives. 

One cannot disagree with that proposal.  But the first hurdle (aside from overturning the hydrocracy) is to define the basic Sustainable Diversion Limits, which in itself is a political decision.  ANY diversions have some impact on (say) a downstream RAMSAR site—the question then is whether a 1% loss of biodiversity is “acceptable” and “sustainable”, or 10%, or 50%?  First Peoples whose relationship with land and water was based on pristine flows will have strong views, but at least in Grafton’s model, they will also have forum to make those views clear.

An informative and sobering read for all water specialists.

 

See also:

Perry, C. 2021. Review of "Dead in the water. A very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe… the death of the Murray-Darling Basin". Allen & Unwin, 2021, by Richard Beasley, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/211-dead

https://www.waterjusticehub.org/retelling-australias-water-story-how-do-we-build-a-more-sustainable-water-future/

Grafton, Q.; Colloff, M.J.; Marshall, V. and Williams, J. 2020. Confronting a ‘post-truth water world’ in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Water Alternatives 13(1): 1-27, Abstract | Full Text - PDF

 

Additional Info

  • Authors: Quentin Grafton
  • Year of publication: 2024
  • Publisher: Monash University Publishing
  • Reviewer: Chris Perry
  • Subject: Water policy, Water governance, Agricultural water use, Water politics, Environmental History, Irrigation, Water crisis, Sustainability, Water allocation, Water security, Drought
  • Type: Review
  • Language: English