Address to Macquarie Cotton Growers Association,
Warren, 29 April 2004
INTRODUCTION
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for the opportunity to visit Warren, see the Macquarie River, and to talk about my monograph, Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment -- launched by the VFF in December last year.
The Murray River is not the Macquarie River, but as many of you will appreciate, the Murray is the icon/the flagship/the example that is driving water policies which impact on all irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin and indeed across Australia.
The general thrust -- evident in the environmental campaigns, the research reports, policy documents, the metropolitan media -- is that our river environments are being degraded and are now in crisis because irrigators are taking too much water.
I came to the issue in July last year.
At that time, both the government and the opposition had made "Saving the Murray" a key policy platform. Increasing environmental flows by taking water from irrigators was seen as the solution -- in the case of the Opposition, by as much as 1,500 gigalitres.
I am the son of a farmer. I grew up believing that problems are not for complaining about, but rather for fixing. It is easier to fix a problem if we understand the problem -- that is, if it is properly defined.
Boxing at shadows can be exhausting -- but achieves nothing.
Basic environmental statistics can give an indication of the nature and magnitude of the problems we face, as well as the extent to which current programmes are successfully addressing the issues.
I started with Murray River issues by looking for the data that I assumed existed, and that I assumed supported the media headlines -- namely, that we have deteriorating water quality, declining native fish stock and dying red gums along the River Murray. This afternoon I will test these beliefs by considering the available evidence for water quality, Murray Cod, red gums and also let us consider the geography of the Murray River's mouth. I will then update you with reference to the findings of the Standing Committee for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries before concluding with some thoughts on Environmentalism.
HOW IS THE WATER QUALITY?
Key water quality indicators can give an indication of the health of a river.
Here is a plot of what increasing salt levels in the Macquarie River might look like, Figure 1.
It has been said there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.
When you look at a graph, it is important to check a few things. The time frame -- is it appropriate?
The site -- is it relevant? The indicator -- is it what we are really interested in?
Actually, this is not a water-quality graph, but rather a plot of the spot price for sugar on the New York Stock Exchange for a very short period two years ago when the price was improving.
The point I really want to make and emphasize is that if you can read a commodity graph, you can read a water-quality graph.
Key water quality indicators are nitrogen, phosphorus, turbidity and salinity levels.
The message with respect to water quality and Murray River salinity in July last year was very clear: The Wentworth Group said that "deteriorating water quality was seriously affecting the sustainability of agriculture", and the CSIRO Website was unambiguous: "salt levels are rising in almost all of the Basin's rivers".
I asked the CSIRO for the data to support the statement on their Website. After some time, they said they didn't have the data and referred me to the MDBC. I discovered that daily readings for salinity are available on request from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) for many key sites, including Morgan in South Australia.
Morgan is considered the key indicator site for water quality in the Murray--Darling Basin because it is below the inflow from the Darling and just upstream of the pipeline off-takes for Adelaide's water supply. According to the MDBC, "its use as an indicator site emphasizes the relative importance of river salinity impacts on all water users in the system."
A plot of the yearly averages for salinity, since recordings were first made back in 1938, show current salinity levels at Morgan are equivalent to pre-World War II levels, Figure 2. I was surprised -- I was expecting an increasing trend.
The peak in 1982 is attributed to the drought at this time, with low flow conditions normally associated with higher salt levels.
A plot of yearly average salinity levels for the last 20 years indicates that salinity levels have dropped since the drought of 1982, Figure 3. Concentrations did not return to the 1982 levels despite the recent drought. Water quality has, in effect, improved.
Upstream -- at Swan Hill and Yarrawonga -- salinity levels are stable, Figure 3.
Contrary to information that was posted on the CSIRO Wwebsite, salinity levels are not increasing at key sites.
The MDBC suggested a plot of five-year rolling averages rather than yearly averages, Figure 4, but concurred with my findings and indicated that average salinity in the river Murray has improved over the last decade.
The improvements are attributed to the salt interception schemes and improvements in on-farm practices. The salt interception works are purported to give a benefit of reducing salinity by 200 EC units, Figure 4.
Interestingly, by comparison, the report of the Expert Reference Panel (the focus of Professor Gary Jones article in The Land newspaper just last week), estimated that sending 350-750 GL down the river as environmental flow would give an improvement of 20-35 EC units, while 1500 gigs would reduce EC by 90 units to an absolute reference condition of 594 EC.
I subsequently plotted other key water quality indicators. Nitrogen, phosphorus and turbidity levels are not increasing -- water quality is not deteriorating in the Murray River.
If we walk around in a dream with our eyes wide closed to the real world, we risk walking into things, bumping our heads, falling down flights of stairs. If we drive our tractors with our eyes closed we will surely bog them, Figure 5.
Yet there is this idea that negotiations can occur and that public policies can be determined on the basis of ideas that are not supported by the evidence -- that is, by the real world data. There is this idea that we can effectively move forward on the basis of belief alone.
BUT THE REAL PROBLEM IS DECLINING FISH NUMBERS?
I wrote up my water quality work as a small paper titled "Received Evidence for Deteriorating Water Quality in the Murray River". The paper was widely circulated on the Internet after the seminar I gave in Canberra on 25 July 2003.
The Deputy Prime Minister's response to this "good news" was typical of many. Speaking in Moree some few weeks later he said, "though we are achieving environmental improvements in some areas, such as reducing the salinity of the Murray ... one indicator of a much broader problem is the decline in native fish numbers throughout the basin."
Murray Cod had just been listed by the Federal Environment Minister, David Kemp, as a vulnerable species under the EPBC Act on the basis that there had been a 30 per cent decline in Murray Cod numbers over the last 50 years.
Would you be surprised, however, if I told you there are no data to support this claim made in the media release associated with the listing and which was reported extensively in the media?
The Australian newspaper has been running a "Saving the Murray" campaign since February 2001, so it immediately runs all and any bad news stories on the river. It picked up on the Minister's media release and ran stories with the headlines "Murray cod on national list" and "For cod's sake, Murray needs stronger flow".
So what do the available data look like for the Murray Cod?
The most widely quoted source of information on native fish status in the Murray-Darling Basin is a survey undertaken in 1995--96 by NSW Fisheries. The survey does not provide any trend data.
The report's principal conclusions include the statement that: "A telling indication of the condition of rivers in the Murray region was the fact that, despite intensive fishing with the most efficient types of sampling gear for a total of 220 person-days over a two-year period in 20 randomly chosen Murray-region sites, not a single Murray cod or freshwater catfish was caught."
A local Murray River fisherman's retort to the scientist's declaration that they didn't catch any fish goes something along the lines, "The scientists, although having letters behind their name, spending some $2million on gear, and 2 years trying, evidently still can't fish."
It is evident from fishing magazines and the results of local fishing competitions that Murray Cod are present.
But perhaps most remarkable is the fact that, at the same time, in the same years, in the same regions that the scientists were undertaking their now much-quoted survey that found not a single Murray Cod, commercial fishermen harvested 26 tonnes of Murray Cod!
I gave a lecture to environmental science students some weeks ago. I was asked to speak to the topic the "burden of proof in the environment sphere". I put it to them that proof/evidence is increasingly unnecessary as more and more scientists are operating on the basis of belief. I laboured the point for the best part of the hour. One student said:
"But belief is important -- it's what makes the world go around".
"Point taken", I replied, "but can we agree there is a huge difference between 'evidence' and 'belief'?"
He didn't seem too convinced. Then again, many beliefs are not troubled by facts because they have nothing to do with fact.
Some people want to live in their own world untroubled about the reality around them.
The reality is that Murray Cod should probably have been listed as vulnerable to extinction 40 years ago when there was a collapse in the fishery, Figure 6. The fishermen tell me that that was when aluminium dinghies first came on the market and before bag limits.
The commercial fishery was closed in 2001, there has been a significant restocking effort and there is a lot of anecdotal information to suggest that cod numbers are now on the increase and carp numbers on the decline. But we don't know, because no proper monitoring programme is in place.
The MDBC's Draft Native Fish Strategy has only one graph and it is the plot of the total commercial catch for Murray Cod wrongly labelled "Catch per Unit Effort". Yet the actual catch per unit effort is trending in the opposite direction, Figure 7.
Some time late last year, the Victorian rural weekly The Weekly Times ran a great cartoon (Figure 8) with a fellow reading the newspaper saying to his mate, "The MDBC aren't coming clean". The mate replied, "My goodness. Are they that short of water?"
BUT HEY, THE RED GUMS NEED SAVING!
Tim Flannery and the Wentworth Group's second report, Blueprint for a National Water Plan, stated unambiguously that vast numbers of 300-year-old red gums were dying along the Murray.
Of course they presented no data. The Wentworth Group's report cited an MDBC survey which also presented no data, the report said they undertook a visual survey and did not distinguish between stressed trees and dying trees, did not estimate the age of the trees -- and certainly didn't count any trees.
After the COAG meeting in November last year -- at which the state and federal government council made the decision to allocate not 1,500 gigs to the river, but 500 gigs for icon sites including the Barmah-Millewa forest -- the SA Environment Minister said it would be the very first time water had been allocated to the environment.
Yet the Barmah-Millewa forest has had an environmental allocation of over 100 gigs a year since 1993, with allocations able to be carried over from year to year.
Despite claims that river red gum forests are dying from lack of water as a result of river regulation since the 1930s and extensive logging, the data actually show that, for example, in the Barmah forest, the trend was one of increasing saw log volume and growing stock during the twentieth century.
Contrasting the number of river red gums along the Murray near Swan Hill in 1896 with numbers in 1996 gives something of a reality check, Figure 9. Much of the current extent of river red gum forest in this area is considered a consequence of flooding in the 1870s that corresponded with the end of Aboriginal burning.
A DRY RIVER MOUTH BECAUSE IRRIGATORS TAKE TOO MUCH WATER?
Soon after taking on the position of Leader of the Opposition, Mark Latham promised to "save the whole Murray River" starting with an allocation of "450 gigalitres to keep the mouth of the Murray open".
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has made the River's mouth a symbol of River health and impressed upon the Australian public the belief that the mouth runs dry because irrigators take too much water from the river. The reality is much more complex. Let us have look at the geography of the area.
The Murray River runs into a large lake system, Figure 10. Famed explorer Charles Sturt was the first white man to travel down the Murray. He left Sydney with a few men and bullock cart in November 1829. They found the upper Murrumbidgee and followed it. When the going got tough with the bullock carts, Sturt and his men assembled the whale boat they were carrying in one of the carts. They made it down the Murrumbidgee in the boat, and into the Murray. The Darling was flowing, as were the Rufous and other rivers.
It was February 1830 when they arrived where the river meets Lake Alexandrina, Figure 10. Sturt wrote in his journal that, "The view was one for which I was not altogether prepared. We had, at length, arrived at the termination of the Murray. Immediately below me was a beautiful lake, which appeared to be a fitting reservoir for the noble stream that had led us to it; and which was now ruffled by the breeze that swept over it."
According to his journal, he had bad toothache and food supplies were low, they wanted to avoid the Aboriginal tribes that they feared would murder them if they proceeded back by the river -- and intended to do this by proceeding to Launceston, Tasmania, in the whale boat.
As they crossed the Lake he remarked, "I was surprised at the extreme shallowness of the lake in every part, as we never had six feet upon the line." And, "Thus far, the waters of the lake had continued sweet; but (on the second day) the transition from fresh to salt water was almost immediate".
As he attempted to reach the ocean on his way to Tasmania from the southern extremity of the lake complex he observed,
it was in vain that we beat across the channel, from one side to the other it was a continued shoal (submerged sandbank), and the deepest water appeared to be under the left bank. The tide, however, had fallen, and exposed broad flats, over which it was hopeless, under existing circumstances, to haul the boat. We again landed on the south side to the channel, patiently to await the high water.
But subsequent attempts were also futile with Sturt reporting that, "Shoals again closed in upon us on every side. We drag the boat over several, and at last got amongst quicksands ... I found we had struck the south coast deep in the bight of Encounter Bay."
The next day he reported, "If I had previously any hopes of being enabled ultimately to push the boat over the flats that were before us, a view of the channel at low water, convinced me of the impracticability of any further attempt. The water was so low that every shoal was exposed, and many stretch directly from one side of the channel to the other".
So, in February 1830, Sturt wrote that the Murray River terminated at the entrance to Lake Alexandrina. The southern perimeter of the Lake, now officially the Murray's Mouth, was then a maze of impassable sandbars. The explorer's observations indicate that Lake Alexandrina was shallow and salty and without a navigable passage to the ocean many decades before water was first extracted from the Macquarie, Darling and Murray Rivers for irrigation.
I call the ACF's conclusion that water extractions for irrigation are directly responsible for the Murray mouth's closure one of those "wet paddocks cause rain stories".
Confusing correlation with cause, along with collecting few useful statistics, burying good news stories, endorsing policies that will have significant social and economic impact while delivering few environmental benefits seems to be the current state of affairs.
FINDINGS OF THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE
Earlier this year, sometime in February, I was contacted by the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and asked if I would attend a meeting in Canberra with the Committee and also Professor Gary Jones who heads the CRC for Freshwater Ecology, Dr John Williams (formerly head of the CSIRO Division of Land and Water), Dr Peter Gehrke (also from CSIRO) and Dr Lee Benson (the Principal of consultants Ecology Management). The Committee asked that the meeting be a frank discussion with a view to resolving the disagreements over the science underpinning the Living Murray Initiative.
Professor Jones began by appealing to his authority as the head of the CRC and also to a scientific consensus. The briefing notes he distributed state: "To my knowledge, there is not one reputable, independent river scientists in Australia who believes that the rivers in the MDB are doing fine." And without quoting a single statistic he stated, "Scientists point to the large body of evidence that, collectively, provides a compelling case for a widespread and on-going decline in river health."
I found the meeting frustrating. While Dr Benson and I were keen to discuss in some detail the science, Dr Williams and Professor Jones spent much of the 3 hours restating that they represent the establishment and the consensus.
This was also the position that Professor Jones took in his article published in The Land last week (22 April 2003) in which, without providing any evidence, he also referred to the decline in the abundance and distribution of native fish, birds and floodplain vegetation. Taking this as a given, he then focused his article on whether government should take 350, 750 or 1,500 gigalitres of additional environmental flow.
This was the focus of the Science Reference Panel Report that began by restating the accepted wisdom: "There is significant evidence that the overall health of the River Murray system is in decline" and "multiple threats to the health of the River Murray system include ... increased salt and sediment loads".
In March 2004, the Federal Government's Standing Committee on Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries handed down its Interim Report which emphatically stated that the scientific evidence does not support the claim that the Murray River needs saving.
The committee relied heavily on my monograph and also the work of ecologist Dr Lee Benson. The majority report of the Committee (which comprised seven Coalition, three ALP, and one Independent member) recommended that, as a matter of urgency, the government delay its proposal to commit water for additional environmental flows.
The committee cited concerns with the quality of the science advice and understanding which underpinned the mooted policy recommendations, which cumulatively are likely to have a significant negative economic and social impact.
The Australian newspaper, which has been running a "Saving the Murray" campaign, immediately responded with three pieces that were all overwhelmingly dismissive of the committee's report, "MP revolt on rescue of Murray", "River mouth needs less talk, more water" and "Downer rejects Murray water delay". Two days later, the national daily followed up with two more articles: "Delay in Murray flow catastrophic" and "Red gums water of life comes down to the river" one of which ran with the subtext, "There may be some people who think a healthy river is a waste of water -- I'm not one of them".
Not one of the stories explained why, for example, the delay might be "catastrophic" or why the river mouth needed more water. No effort was made to understand or analyse why the Parliamentary Committee was providing such strong advice that challenged the existing environmental policies of both the Government and the Opposition.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
In material, standard-of-living terms, Western democracies have progressed and benefited enormously from the secularization of society and the power of independent science. There is, however, increasing evidence that many scientists and scientific organizations are struggling to maintain the distinction between the empirical evidence and their belief in "The Litany" -- that our air, land and water resources are deteriorating despite evidence to the contrary.
Embracing that Litany and working with environmental campaigns also promises buckets of easy government money for government scientists.
Michael Crichton, notable American writer and author of Jurassic Park, has described environmentalism as a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths:
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming to us all. We are all energy sinners (for the purposes of the Murray and Macquaire Rivers, water sinners), doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is Salvation in the church of the environment.
If we accept environmentalism as the new religion, then it is perhaps easier to understand much of the current public policy agenda regarding water. It is as much about process as outcome. It is as much about what is morally right and wrong as it is about the real state of the river environment and fixing real environmental problems. Furthermore, if we accept that the extraction of water from rivers as sinning, then perhaps all irrigators are doomed to live in a state of permanent sin regardless of how much water you leave in our rivers and dams!
Thank you.
For the Parliamentary Interim Report mentioned in this speech, [130k PDF], please click here
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