Is Murray money worth its salt?

The Murray River was the focus of the Federal Government's commitment to the environment when the Federal Budget was announced last week.

An extra $500 million was allocated to saving the river, with money to further reduce salinity levels, buy another 500 gigalitres of environmental flow and to build more fishways.

Twenty years ago salt levels were rising and hundreds of millions of dollars of public money was spent building salt interception schemes along the river.

Salt levels at the key site of Morgan in South Australia, which is just upstream from the offshoot for Adelaide's water supply, are now half what they were 20 years ago.  How much lower does the government want to push salt levels?

The Murray is not a European river;  the Australian landscape is naturally salty and many native fish species are adapted to fluctuating levels of salt, including periods of high salinity particularly during droughts.

During the recent drought, South Australia was guaranteed 85 per cent of its normal water allocation.  Given this commitment, there was no opportunity to let stretches of the river just dry up, as would naturally occur during a major drought event.

Instead, during the recent drought there was this idea the river should stay brimming with water.

Yet it is claimed that there is never enough water at the very bottom of the system.  There is a dredge removing sand to keep the Murray's mouth open and this is a popular symbol of the claimed inadequate environmental flow.

In fact, the Murray River flows into a large lake complex.  When British explorer Charles Sturt first sailed down the river in the early 1830s in a whale boat, there was good flow in both the Murray and Darling Rivers, yet Sturt could not get through to the Southern Ocean from the lakes because of the sand bars and sand banks.

We now dredge the sand to create a mouth below the lakes and have built a series of large barrages across five channels to stop freshwater flowing out to sea.

A consequence of the barrages is that they keep the seawater out, even when the ocean breaks through the sand bars.  This keeps the lower lakes artificially fresh and at a more-or-less constant water level.  To blame the sand bars on inadequate environmental flow is to rewrite history and ignore the geography of the lower Murray.

In the same way, it is wrong to suggest that the Murray doesn't already receive an environmental flow allocation.  However, neither the Murray Darling Basin Commission, nor any government, can tell me how much this is in total.

When Murray Irrigation Ltd made water savings in the late 1990s it was encouraged to give the water to a wetland working group.  In 2002, at the height of the drought, this wetland working group sold 23 gigalitres of water back to irrigators for $3.8 million.  Much of the money from the trade was apparently used to build a fishway.

This may have been a good investment, but we don't know because there has been inadequate monitoring of the river environment.  We don't know whether native fish numbers have been increasing or decreasing over the past few decades.

I am concerned that the federal government has already spent enough public money on the Murray River.  I find it hard to believe that there is room for another salt interceptions scheme and I wonder what the environmental benefit will really be from another fishway and more environmental flow allocations.

Incredibly, when it comes to the Murray River there is no audit, no cost-to-benefit analysis, just more money continually promised to "save the environment" -- whatever that means.

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