Watering the dry continent

November 29, 2008
Issue 

Thirsty Country: Options for Australia

By Asa Wahlquist

Jacana Books, 2008

216 pages, $27.95

Thirsty Country: Options for Australia is a useful summary of the water crisis that Australia is currently facing.

It covers domestic and agricultural water usage — looking at the water systems of five major Australian cities, an overview of water use in agriculture and a section specifically looking at the Murray-Darling basin.

The author, Asa Wahlquist has been the rural writer for the Australian since 1991.

Wahlquist provides an abundance of data going back more than 100 years. It is a well-researched book. However, I found it disappointing that while it paints a picture of the enormous problems that Australia's water systems face, it provides very little substance on how things could be improved.

I think Wahlquist's intention was to debunk some myths in relation to irrigation. But I suspect there is a certain amount of rural bias and she doesn't want to face the difficult question of how dramatically the agricultural sector needs to be restructured to make water use sustainable.

Thirsty Country provides lots of interesting statistics, one being water usage in Australia in 2004-05: the biggest user was agriculture at 65%, the second biggest was households at 11%. Other big users were manufacturing, electricity and gas supply, and mining. A considerable section of the book was devoted to households, even though their usage was only 11%.

Wahlquist is quite critical of desalination but didn't rule it out as an option that some cities may have to adopt: "Both recycling and desalination require the same process, but desalination needs five times more energy. So why the headlong rush to desalination, not recycling, in a world ever more conscious of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions?" she asks.

There is a very good explanation of how the recycling system works, and how it is an extremely viable option for a range of cities. But you have to look at the context of each city. Recycling water relies on pumping, or piping the treated water back into a city's water supplies.

The cost of the piping needs to be taken into consideration: "Water is heavy: 1 cubic metre, or 1 kilolitre, weighs 1 tonne. When water has been in short supply, many regions have looked to bountiful supplies nearby ... and pondered piping that water ... from the Kimberley to Perth, from the Burdekin River in north Queensland to Brisbane, from the Clarence River on New South Wales north coast to Brisbane, from the Clarence inland to the Darling River, and from the Goulburn River to Melbourne...

"But the infrastructure needed to pipe, lift and pump water all uses a lot of energy, and energy is expensive. The practical limit on most piping schemes is how they compare with the energy costs of other supplies, such as desalination. As a general rule of thumb, if water has to be piped more than 200 kilometres it is cheaper, and less energy-expensive, to desalinate."

Wahlquist argues that recycled water is not practical for Sydney. It may cost tens of millions of dollars to transfer water from Malabar sewerage treatment plant to Warragamba (Sydney's water supply). However in Adelaide it's quite a different scenario: "The cost of moving the sewerage from where it is to where it needs to be is quite modest. It is only a few kilometers and it is really open ground."

However, a cheaper option for Sydney proposed by Wahlquist is the local solution — rainwater tanks. It is the same case for Brisbane. "More stormwater runs off the rooftops, streets and parks of Sydney and Brisbane than is delivered to businesses and households by their water authorities."

So that begs the question — why is Sydney putting so many resources into building a desalination plant when a better solution is to put rainwater tanks in backyards? "Because the solution is small-scale and local, and won't earn income for Big Water," Wahlquist said.

While Wahlquist makes quite an accurate assessment, I think she draws the wrong conclusions. She is very critical of "bureaucracies that are accustomed to making fat profits out of water", but it appears as though her solution is privatisation.

She doesn't explicitly make that call, but in the section on agriculture, she talks very favourably about experiences of private companies in control of some irrigation systems. She paints a picture that government-run irrigation areas are inefficient — both in water wastage as well as economically.

If she is talking about "Big Water" wanting to make profits out of water provision, surely privatisation is only going to exacerbate that problem?

It's also a furphy that government-run enterprises are necessarily less efficient than private. If the will of the government was to develop better technology in irrigation, it could certainly happen.

From my reading of Thirsty Country, the substantive change that Wahlquist advocates is for greater efficiency in irrigation systems. Some "old infrastructure" using "open channels was losing 20 to 30 per cent of water... They pipelined the supply, saving the lost water, and farmers adopted modern water-saving irrigation methods."

Wahlquist argues in favour of maintaining the rice and cotton industries, while not explicitly saying it. There is a section on rice that details the fact that "they have the highest production per hectare" and "rice growers argue their follow-up crops, like wheat, barley and corn, use the leftover water to provide a bigger than average crop".

The other argument Wahlquist puts for rice and cotton, over other types of irrigated agriculture, like grapevines for example, is that they are annual crops, so if it is a dry season, they don't plant rice and cotton; whereas grapevines need irrigation every year regardless of rainfall.

Coming from a farming family myself, I can understand Wahlquist's reservation regarding rice and cotton. If she argued for their removal she would receive a lot of flack, and possibly put her job on the line.

With all the difficulties the farming sector is facing — in particular the severity of the current drought — it is understandable that the prospect of fundamental changes to methods of farming is much too hard to contemplate. But it appears as though fundamental changes do need to be made, but should be made with government support to small farmers.

Thirsty Country has some great information about the Murray-Darling Basin. The statistics are really alarming. The long-term average inflow into the Murray River system is 11,200 gigalitres per year (average from 1892-2005).

In 2006 there was 220 gigalitres — the lowest on record. And in 2007 it was 2100 gigalitres, the fourth-lowest on record. Put these two years side-by-side — the situation is catastrophic. Wahlquist also raises the question of how much climate change is affecting the current crisis.

There is a chapter devoted to "What we can do".

After reading this really scary information about the Murray-Darling Basin — the water system that covers such a significant agricultural area of Australia, it was extremely disappointing to read that one of our options is to grow veggies in our backyards because this is less water-intensive than market-gardening.

I guess it was a bit over-optimistic of me to expect arguments for fundamental change from the Australian's rural writer, but I do think if there was ever a time to argue for systemic change rather than individual solutions, now is it.

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