Denying Good News about Salt

The Australian Parliament's Senate Environment Committee has just released a report about salinity, concluding we need to accept that salinity is part of the Australian environment and that we'll have to live with it.

The challenge, according to the Senators, is to do more to repair and improve the damage that has already been done.

The problem of rising groundwater in the NSW Riverina once seemed unmanageable.  In 1990 123,300 hectares was considered at high risk of salinity because the water table was within two meters of the surface.

At that time it was predicted that if the irrigators did nothing, by 2006 228,700 hectares would be lost to salt.

If the irrigators committed to a $473 million program with $150 million from the state and federal governments it was predicted that only 182,620 million hectares would be lost.

The irrigators therefore got stuck into the program in the early 1990s, including the implementation of drainage works often involving water recycling systems to reduce recharge to the groundwater and improve water use efficiency.

The actual area now affected by shallow water tables is just 3,758 hectares -- this is just two percent of the area that the NSW government thought would be affected under the most optimist scenario.

However, this and other good news stories have been omitted from the Senate report, which reads as though hardly anything has been done.

The report recommends an extension of funding for the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality -- a project that began in 2001 with a budget of $1.4 billion.

But it's unclear from the Senate report how this $1.4 billion has actually been spent.

The Senate report repeats the old finding from the National Land and Water Audit's Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000 that 17 million hectares of Australian farmland could be lost to dryland salinity by 2050.

Yet various recent reports including from CSIRO scientists have shown the 17 million hectare figure to be a gross exaggeration.

As Mick Keogh, the Australian Farm Institute's executive director, recently explained:

"Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate were wrong, or should not have been used.

"There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent.

"Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels -- a critical element in salinity assessments -- that defy the laws of gravity and science, and are not supported by available data".

At some point in time, the Australian community and the Australian Senate must accept that farmers have learnt how to manage salt.

No, it hasn't gone away, but the area affected by salinity is contracting and this is a good news story everyone should be shouting about.

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