Antinuclear

The dictionary defines an emergency as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action”. If there is a climate emergency – and 330,000 Australians have already signed a petition to the Australian Government to declare a climate emergency – then surely there must also be a water emergency here, right now, in Australia. As in any emergency, it requires that we be told the truth and, importantly, act on the truth.

Political leaders, however, prefer the word ‘drought’ because Australia has experienced it in the past and it is ‘solved’ when the rains come. Politicians cannot be blamed for acts of nature. ‘Drought relief’ also gives politicians the opportunity to pretend to fix the problem while showing compassion for those doing it tough.

Income support in the form of a farm household allowance for eligible households with less than $5 million in assets, and that pays more than  $30,000 per farming couple per year for up to four years,  is, no doubt, very welcome to those who qualify. Unfortunately, it does not solve our water emergency. In this make-believe narrative, all blame accrues to the heavens.

The current drought began in 2017, and came less than 10 years after the Millennium Drought ended. Yet the nation’s elected leaders are surprised by another major drought. Like rabbits on the road facing the full beam of an approaching vehicle, they seem unable to move beyond last century solutions to respond to this water emergency.

Instead, they announce multi-billion dollar commitments of taxpayer money for dams, many of which won’t be completed for years and would never fill until the drought ends. Water extracted from the dams would also be subject to water extraction limits under the Basin Plan.

So why do Australian political leaders support dam building as a solution knowing that dams don’t make it rain or snow? Is it because they are stuck in the past,  trapped in myths or delusions, or asleep at the wheel?

If only this were true. Australia could then solve the water emergency by simply ‘briefing’ the Prime Minister, Premiers, and Water Ministers about the 21st Century solutions to the water emergency.

They could be informed of solutions like comprehensive water accounting so that everyone knows who has the water and what it is being used for. Other solutions include water planning that leaves sufficient water in the dams for people to drink by setting enough water aside for the worst droughts, and water recycling and reuse by communities to reduce extraction. Or even managed aquifer recharge to reduce surface water evaporation, and dynamic water pricing that increases the volumetric price paid when dams have less water — the list goes on.

So what is getting in the way of implementing these solutions? Money, power, and influence. Both rent-seeking and regulatory capture, represent the demand for and the supply of water respectively, and are affecting decision-making that benefits particular interests, rather than the broader public interest.

Rent-seeking is when actions are undertaken by people and organisations outside of government to influence decision-making for self-interest, rather than for the sake of improving the decision. Many forms of rent-seeking are legal in Australia, including lobbying — a multi-billion-dollar business.

Rent-seeking allows privileged access to our elected leaders and advisors to those with the means to get it. For example, between 2014 and 2018 the NSW Irrigation Council had more than 25 water-related meetings with New South Wales Ministers, yet many non-industry and non-irrigation entities had only one meeting. All combined, Indigenous, catchment, and environment entities had just 20 per cent of the total number of ministerial meetings given to irrigation and industry entities in the period.

So what does privileged access mean? Decision-making that the NSW Natural Resources Commission has described, in relation the Barwon-Darling River Water Sharing Plan, that has

“…increased allowance for extractive use at lower flow classes that are critical to the environment. These provisions benefit the economic interest of a few upstream users over the ecological and social needs of the many”.

This decision-making contributed to the dire situation in the Murray-Darling Basin and the massive fish kills along the Darling River in January 2019. Sadly, it is just one of many examples of water decision-making not made in the public interest, and described by the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission in January this year as “gross maladministration”.

Billions of dollars in expenditure on irrigation infrastructure, including the construction of private dams, highlighted in the ABC’s Four Corners program in July 2019 Cash Splash, and supported by evidence in peer-reviewed academic research, shows that such subsidies are likely to reduce return flows from irrigators’ fields to groundwater, streams, and rivers.

Yet, the Australian Government has spent some $4 billion on subsidising irrigation infrastructure in the Murray-Darling Basin without any cost-benefit analysis or even comprehensive measures of the impacts on stream flows.

To add to our water woes, more billions of dollars have been allocated to further subsidise water infrastructure, including dams, and announced as a ‘solution’ to the water emergency. Such spending is highly unlikely to generate a net public benefit.

As Rome burns, people in towns like Wilcannia on the lower Darling get their drinking water from 10 litre cartons delivered from the back of trucks. In a desperate cry of help, and defiance, one Barkandji Elder from Wilcannia, Kerry ‘Sissy’ King, has a message for politicians to

“Come out here and see how you feel about living [with no water]. They’ve taken it from the nation that lives off the river system. Come and sit in the gutter with us.”

Australia must stop blaming the river and recognise that capture by special interests has led to this water emergency. It is not simply an act of God; it has arisen from a lack of planning and decision-making that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Neither drought relief nor dams are solutions. Instead, Australia needs its political leaders to lead, to put the national interest first, and to make decisions that place people before profit.

But Scott Morrison has never lacked confidence.

In the florid prime ministerial tale unfurled on Friday at the Queensland Resources Council (and boy folks, it was a doozy), progressivism wanted to tell you what job you can have, what you can say, what you can think “and tax you more for the privilege of all of those instructions that are directed to you” – which made progressivism kind of busy, and a whole lot more organised and efficient than progressivism generally is.

We could, on Friday, have been treated to a measured prime ministerial reflection on the problems associated with cancellation culture. The Labor frontbencher Clare O’Neil showed this week that conversation can be attempted without everyone losing their minds. We could have had some words to bring the country together.

But after a brief touchdown in the goat’s cheese circle, which was somehow intrinsically hostile to mining in ways that weren’t really unpacked (and perhaps that might have been risky, given Morrison was addressing a business lunch where goat’s cheese might, accidentally, have featured) – we arrived, unexpectedly it must be said, at the sneering apocalypse.

Morrison warned that a new breed of #RadicalActivism™ was the on the march, “apocalyptic in tone, brooks no compromise, all or nothing, alternative views not permitted – a dogma that pits cities against regional Australia, one that cannot resist sneering at wealth creating and job creating industries, and the livelihoods particularly of regional Australians including here in Queensland”.

Apart from this being overhyped, high-velocity bollocks, it pays to remember right at this juncture that the actual purpose of Morrison’s address on Friday was to foreshadow a government crackdown against forms of activism and protests that the Coalition and the mining industry finds inconvenient.

So, just in case this unclear, let me spell it out: we were being treated to the spectacle of a prime minister teeing off against intolerance while in the same breath foreshadowing his own bout of government sanctioned intolerance – the type where police might be involved, and people might be bundled away in vans.

Yes, that happened. I saw it, because the prime minister’s speech was broadcast outside Queensland. It wasn’t always clear that Morrison knew the audience looking on at lunchtime on Friday might be broader than the residents of central Queensland, but it was broadcast nationally. To the south-east corner of the sunshine state, and Sydney, and Melbourne.

Unremarked in this stirring presentation was the fact that climate-related activism is building right at the moment, both at the community level, from the schoolkids to the grandmas, and also at the shareholder level, in large part because the Coalition has invited it.

The government who finds this activism inconvenient is the same government who has sparked the activism, given its purpose and salience and traction, because of its own woeful record on climate change……..

Apart from the perversity of a government railing against a set of conditions it has, itself, created, there was also the curiosity about carbon risk, which was presented implicitly by Morrison as a fiction of progressivism, #RadicalActivism™ and the sneering apocalypse. ………

This strange diktat will be news to the regulators – the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – who are calmly out in the marketplace warning stakeholders on a regular basis to get their houses in order or risk being stranded in the inevitable transition, who present carbon risk as what it is: a threat to financial stability in Australia.

They’ll be astonished to learn they are the unwitting tools of the deep progressive state, co-opted by the noisy Australians. Shh, no one tell them.

This strange diktat will be news to the regulators – the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – who are calmly out in the marketplace warning stakeholders on a regular basis to get their houses in order or risk being stranded in the inevitable transition, who present carbon risk as what it is: a threat to financial stability in Australia.

They’ll be astonished to learn they are the unwitting tools of the deep progressive state, co-opted by the noisy Australians. Shh, no one tell them. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/01/as-he-rails-against-activism-morrison-turns-a-bit-sinister-a-little-bit-threatening