Does the Murray River Still Need Saving?

On budget night the Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, pledged MORE public money to "Save the Murray River".

An extra $500 million will be spent on projects to reduce salt levels in the river by building more salt interception schemes, more fishways so fish can more easily travel along the river, and to buy more water from irrigators for environmental flow for the river.

But does the Murray still need saving?

As a tax payer with an interest in environmental issues, I am concerned that the federal government has already spent enough public money on the Murray River.  There has been no audit, no cost to benefit analysis, just more money continually promised.  The time has come for a stock-take, and a reassessment of what all this money is hoping to achieve.

My first question is -- is there a need for another salt interception scheme?  Salt levels have halved since the first salt interception scheme was built in 1982.  Just how much lower does the government want to push salt levels?  It is true that thirty years ago salt levels were rising and it was feared that Adelaide's water supply would soon be undrinkable.  Since then salt levels have been trending downwards.  The river may now be the freshest it's ever been.

We should remember -- the Murray is not a European river.  The Australian landscape is naturally salty and many native fish species can adapt to fluctuating levels of salinity, particularly during drought.

My second question is -- how come the river was brimming with water during the recent drought?

There is a story told in Echuca, a town in north-west Victoria, about a visit from Peter Garrett, the then President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.  He stood on the wharf lamenting the drought and the need for more water for the river -- but this was just after water had been released from Hume Dam.  The locals looked on as city journalists and film crews recorded his every word -- apparently oblivious to the fact that that the river was brimming with water.

Modern water management practices -- like saving water from the Snowy Mountains in Lake Hume and promising it to South Australia -- means that there is no opportunity to let stretches of the river just dry-up during drought.  This would have occurred naturally in the past.  For example, photographs taken on New Year's day in 1914 show a completely dry river bed at Riversdale, just south of Euchuca.

Yet it is often claimed that there is never enough water at the very bottom of the system, at the Murray's mouth.

How often have you seen images of that dredge working to remove sand to keep the Murray's mouth open?  It is a symbol of inadequate environmental flow.  But history reveals that these sand bars are actually naturally occurring.

When British explorer Charles Sturt first sailed down the river in the early 1830s, he reported good flow in the Murray and Darling Rivers.  But he couldn't get through to the Southern Ocean in his boat because of the sand bars.  We now dredge the sand to create an artificial mouth below the lakes and have built a series of large barrages across five channels to stop freshwater flowing out to sea.

To now blame the sand bars on irrigation is to rewrite history.  The irrigators take water that would once, before all the levies were in place, have naturally spilt out across the great flood plains of the Riverina.

In the same way it is wrong to suggest that the Murray River doesn't already receive a significant environmental flow allocation.

When Murray Irrigation Ltd, a large irrigation company supplying water to farmers in the NSW Riverina, made water savings in the late 1990s, it was encouraged to give the saved water to a wetland working group -- which it did.  In 2002, at the height of the drought, this wetland working group sold 23 gigalitres of water back to irrigators for $3.8 million dollars.  Much of the money from this water trade was used to build a fishway.

Which brings me to my final question -- what is the cost to benefit analysis of another fish way for The Murray?

Building more fishways may be a good investment for the environment, 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 last few decades and no government will tell me what the total environmental water allocation is for the Murray River.

The Murray River is an old river, running through a semi-arid environment.  Let's accept it as such, and not pretend it should be, or ever was, fresh, blue and always brimming with water.