Whisky is for drinking. Water is for fighting over

Address to Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT),
Sustainability Soiree:  Beyond the Politics of Water
Melbourne, 9th June, 2004

INTRODUCTION

Mark Twain said, "Whiskey is for drinking.  Water is for fighting over".

He also said, "I've seen a heap of trouble in my life and most of it never came to pass".

And so it might just be that the "water crisis" in Australia (and globally) is a preoccupation -- something that has distracted and engaged us -- rather than a real crisis.

After all, saving water, and saving rivers, makes for a good environmental campaign.  And environmental campaigns can give meaning to the lives of those who would like to have something to save.

Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this evening's discussion.

I will use my 15 minutes to answer the three questions I have, as a panelist, been given, by illustrating this point:  that we like to worry about water while sitting in our warm baths of drinking-quality water, sipping whisky.

I will explain that if we really want to understand the current water agenda, both nationally and globally, and if we want to be able eventually to move beyond politics, it is necessary that we first understand "environmentalism".

Q1.  What are the competing interests and issues around water?

Dorothea McKellar penned "My Country" a neat 100 years ago, in 1904, when Australia was in drought and before most of our current water infrastructure had been developed.  She wrote,

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die --
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

We have, in Australia, been going through another very dry period.  Last year, our newspapers were reporting that it was the nation's worst drought in more than a century.

In October last year, I read in our national daily that Sydney residents witnessed the introduction of "tough new water restrictions".  So tough that they involved restrictions on when gardens are watered and how cars are washed.

Given that in the midst of the worst drought in 100 years, Sydney and Melbourne dams were still half full, we might have acknowledged that the cities had essentially been drought-proofed.

In the midst of the worst drought in 100 years, our preoccupation has been with having the right hose nozzle and how we wash our cars.  I've heard that some children, recognising water is very precious, are now asking for their cordial straight.

There are real water shortages in the world, but they are not in Australia.

Close to half the developing world is suffering from one or more diseases associated with the inadequate provision of water.  These shortages are where there is real poverty.

Some of the driest countries such as Saudi Arabia have enough water from desalinisation technologies.  After all, we live on what has been described as the Blue Planet.  Planet earth is 70 per cent covered by water.

In terms of available fresh water per capita, we have a lot of water in Australia;  with most of it falling in northern Australia.  According to the World Resource Institute, we have 51,000 litres of available water per capita per day.  This is one of the highest levels in the world after Russia and Iceland, and well ahead of countries such as the USA at 24,000 and the UK at only 3,000 litres per capita per day.  This doesn't mean we should pipe water south, but it does mean we have choices.

Globally, water use is growing but is still less than 17 per cent of available accessible water.

Most of the diverted water is used for agriculture -- around 70 per cent nationally and globally.  And globally, agricultural water usage has stabilised below 2,000 litres per capita per day due to higher water use efficiencies as a result of improved technologies.

One of the next big potential efficiency gains is through biotechnology -- through the genetic modification of our crops.

In Australia, we divert only 5 per cent of mean annual runoff.  And of this 5 per cent we even export some of it as food.  Did you know that rice growers in the Murray-Darling Basin now produce and export enough rice to feed 40 million people a meal each day, every day of the year?  And after they have grown the rice crop, the residual soil water is usually used to grow a crop of wheat -- most of this also exported.

According to the IPCC, with climate change, in some areas it will get wetter, in others drier.  Australian climatologists predict that it will generally get wetter as it gets warmer.

But I read a few weeks ago in the Sydney Morning Herald that, "Full dams will not end water restrictions".  Why?  Because, "A survey by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal found high levels of public support for water restrictions".

Water restrictions in metropolitan Australia might be popular and impacting marginally on people's lifestyles, but not significantly on pay packets and profit margins.  In contrast, the Living Murray Initiative targets Australian irrigators and has the potential to impact significantly on the viability of communities in rural and regional Australia.

It is often only when decisions are likely to affect us significantly that we bother to check the facts.  This brings me to the second question.

Q2.  If 60 highly credible scientists can be accused of getting it wrong on the health of the Murray, what role does science play in the management of water?

Real science has nothing whatsoever to do with numbers.  A consensus of 60 or 60,000 scientists is not science.  Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means he or she has results that are verifiable with reference to the real world.

I looked for the evidence to support the claims of declining water quality, declining native fish stock and dying red gums in July last year.  I discovered junk science supporting predetermined agendas.

Last year, the CSIRO Website was claiming "salt levels are rising in almost all of the Basin's rivers".  The reality is that salinity levels have reduced over the last two decades, particularly at the key site of Morgan where they have halved.  Morgan is just upstream from the off-takes for Adelaide's water supply.

Despite repeated claims that other water quality indicators are also deteriorating, official statistics indicate that nitrogen, phosphorus and turbidity levels are stable and generally consistent with a healthy river system in the context of inland Australia.

Red gum forests in Victoria and New South Wales are generally healthy.  Indeed, the largest forests are recognised as internationally significant wetlands because of their high biodiversity and because they regularly support very large colonies of water birds.

Despite propaganda that dryland salinity and rising water tables are destroying agriculture and the environment in the Murray-Darling Basin, the region celebrated a record wheat harvest last summer.

Much has been made of the Murray's blocked mouth as a symbol of irrigators taking too much water.  It is evident, however, from the diary of explorer Charles Sturt that in 1830 -- before water was diverted for irrigation -- the Murray's mouth was then, as it is now, a maze of sandbars.

The official statistics from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission show diversion for irrigation and Adelaide's water supply total 34 per cent of inflows in an average year in the Murray River -- much below the often falsely quoted figure of 80 per cent.

Murray cod was listed as vulnerable to extinction in July last year on the basis that there had been a 30 per cent decline over the last 50 years.  The Australian newspaper ran a story titled, "For cod's sake, Murray needs stronger flow" (July 5, 2003).  But there are no data to support the claims of declining Murray cod numbers.

The most widely quoted source on native fish status in the Murray-Darling Basin is a 1995-96 NSW Fisheries survey.  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 ... was caught".

A local Murray River fisherman's retort to the scientist's declaration that they caught no fish goes something along the lines, "The scientists, although having letters behind their names, spending some $2 million on gear, and 2 years trying, evidently still can't fish".

In the same regions, at the same time the scientists could catch not a single Murray cod, the commercial harvest was 26 tonnes.

The Environmental science sector is currently operating well below the standards of accountability that have been established and are enforced for other sectors.  The days are long gone when the stock market assigned any value to financial statements solely on the basis that the directors found mates at the club to peer review the document.

Environmentalism is subversive because it uses the authority that science can give to an idea to justify beliefs that have no evidential basis -- to justify beliefs that have no basis in observation or tested theory.

Q3.  How do we get beyond politics?  What role can RMIT play?

In the first instance, there is a need to take environmentalism out of science.  This is going to be even harder than moving beyond politics, because religion can be even harder than politics to deal with.

Recently, I gave a lecture to a class of environmental science students on "The Burden of Proof in the Environment Sphere".  My key message was proof/ evidence appears to be increasingly unnecessary as scientists increasingly operate on the basis of belief.

The lecture focused on the inconsistencies between the claims of environmental scientists and the available evidence with respect to the Murray-Darling system.

As the lecture progressed, the students became uncomfortable but they didn't seem outraged by the inconsistencies.

While I continued to emphasise the importance of operating on the basis of evidence, the point was made to me by the students that, "Belief is important.  It is what makes the world go around".  One of their main concerns was that if people believed that everything was OK, the environment would be destroyed.

The reality is that problems of water availability and pollution are being solved through technological and engineering innovations.  While many university facilities remain wedded to the concept that our land, air and water are generally becoming ever more polluted, and that technology is the problem rather than the solution, the empirical evidence does not support this belief.

Environmentalism has been described as the new religion of choice for urban atheists.

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.

In material, standard-of-living terms, Western democracies have progressed and benefited enormously from the secularisation of society and the power of independent science.

The issues of scientific integrity, and the extent to which technology can continue to provide solutions for environmental problems, needs to be publicly and openly debated -- because in the end, the integrity of science is dependent on a secular society that understands and values truth above environmentalism.