Six years ago the National Farmers Federation (NFF) and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) joined forces to lobby the federal government for $65 billion dollars on the premise dryland salinity was spreading at an alarming rate.
This campaign was based on a joint report, Repairing the Country, which was published just before the National Land and Water Resources Audit's dryland salinity assessment was released claiming 17 million hectares of farmland would be lost to salt.
Then a few months later, the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality was announced, with the promise of $1.4 billion in funding.
Australian agriculture was making headlines and for all the wrong reasons.
In the last six years the area affected by dryland salinity has contracted and it is now evident that the "rising ground water" model, on which some of the very gloomy predictions were based, has limited application outside of irrigation areas.
It is also apparent that many of the claims, irrespective of the model used, could not be supported by the available evidence.
Channel Nine's Sunday Program featured a story on salinity on May 28 suggesting that millions of dollars have been wasted on dubious claims.
The program repeated the standing joke in western Queensland that the controversial painting in the Australian national gallery called Blue Poles, is about as much use for predicting salinity as the official salinity hazard maps often referred to as "red poles" by local landholders.
As Dr Brian Tunstall, formerly a CSIRO research scientist, explained, over much of the area marked red on the Queensland maps, there's no groundwater for over a hundred metres down, and yet the rising groundwater model was used to produce the red splotches that are purported to indicate salinity hazard.
Dr Wendy Craik headed the NFF when it claimed dryland salinity was spreading.
On Sunday, Dr Craik acknowledged that as a taxpayer, she is pleased all the money she asked for on behalf of the NFF was not provided, and that flawed models were used to talk up the salinity threat.
Dr Craik, now heads the Murray Darling Basin Commission (MDBC), and is still publishing reports based on the flawed rising groundwater model.
For example, just two weeks ago the MDBC published Risks to the Shared Water Resources of the Murray-Darling Basin which includes an assessment that in the lower Murray, salt loads from clearing for dryland agriculture 50-90 years ago are going to manifest as a worsening river salinity problem in 100 years time.
The Sunday program exposed evidence pointing to possible scientific fraud in salinity science and management in Australia.
But which politician or organisation is going to lead the charge for accountability and change?
It would seem that both sides of politics, and both the ACF and NFF have been complicit in the salinity charade so far.
The big loser continues to be Australian agriculture.
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