Within just a few weeks, rural communities across the Murray-Darling Basin will know if proposed water cuts have been substantially revised in the Federal Government's new draft water plan for Australia's biggest food production region.
At a recent Senate estimates hearing, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's chief executive Rhondda Dickson confirmed the plan was in the final stages, and on track to be launched by mid-November. When asked, several times by Coalition senators, if there was any likelihood the launch could be postponed, Dr Dickson said this was unlikely. But ears attuned to the nuances of political language know this is not the same as emphatically ruling something out. There is still a possibility the launch could drift into early December, taking the community consultation period for the revised plan into the Christmas break - a time when rural families, like the rest of us, look forward to time out from a busy work schedule. Any further delays will mean consultation could coincide with a busy period for basin farmers, when they need to be focused on summer plantings and negotiating new market contracts. Modern farming is a multi-tasking business that rarely has the luxury of downtime.
In the weeks following that Senate hearing, there has been speculation among farm industry groups that opportunities for comment on the new draft plan may be tightly controlled. This unease has been prompted by vague answers from authority bureaucrats to estimates questions about the number of public meetings to be scheduled after the launch. It was even suggested at one point, by the authority, that some basin communities might not even want public meetings.
Earlier this year, Professor Margaret Alston told a Murray-Darling Basin forum in Dubbo that farming families and rural communities were unfairly bearing the brunt of Australia's need to revitalise its rivers. Professor Alston, who heads Monash University's social work department, said proposed federal water reforms had brought stress and uncertainty to rural families. Social impacts included mental health problems, an increase in rural suicides and greater reliance on alcohol and drugs to cope with stress. ''There is a very real sense of grief and loss,'' Professor Alston said.
Australian poet and award-winning novelist Kate Jennings grew up on an irrigation farm near Griffith. In a recent essay published in The Monthly, Jennings wrote that one of her first thoughts on reading the previous draft guide to the basin plan (dumped after protests over the scale of proposed water cuts) was ''How did all of Australia manage overnight to become experts on rice and cotton growing?'' She has a point. Australia's rice farmers are the world's most water efficient, which has been acknowledged by the United Nations. It has ranked the lower reaches of the Murrumbidgee as the global standard for river catchment management. So Riverina rice farmers - many of them stalwarts of local Landcare groups - must have more than a vague inkling about landscape ecology.
Jennings also took aim at campaign scare tactics used by some green lobby groups. She criticised their ''mantric'' use of words such as ''sustainability'', and empty phrases like ''we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this right''. What does this mean, she asked? Exactly why are we limited to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Or are these just ''piffle words that have come to mean everything and nothing''.
Australia has a new generation of farmers emerging, many with tertiary degrees in environmental management. They are brimming with ideas, keen to farm in new ways they hope will enable them to move away from the economic uncertainties often imposed on their parents by Australia's supermarket duopoly. They are the future of rural Australia, and well aware of the benefits of soil carbon and cyber retailing to niche markets. But who in government is listening to them? Fix the impact of supermarket chains on crop production and prices, and that will fix many of the basin's water problems, some young farmers argue. It will mean farmers get a better price for produce, and can do more with less water.
Farmers have stressed that they too want to see healthy rivers. But they also want healthy rural communities, with business opportunities for a new generation. They are hoping the revised draft basin plan will show their concerns have been listened to, and this time, the science is solid (remember, even CSIRO had reservations about the way its modelling data was used) and there is more emphasis on irrigation infrastructure efficiency. And if not? Then the next step could well be a High Court challenge to the Federal Water Act.
