Australia's supermarket duopoly poses a bigger threat than water reform to irrigated farming across the Murray-Darling Basin, a water policy historian says.
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Australian National University research fellow Daniel Connell said economic reforms to the national food-purchasing chain were needed to give farmers fairer farm-gate prices, reflecting a more equitable share of the retail price of products.
''I think food is too cheap, and prices don't reflect the environment costs - including water use - involved in food production. Those costs should be shared, not solely born by the producers,'' he said.
Dr Connell, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of water politics in the Murray-Darling Basin, also warned the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's draft water-management plan was likely to ''disappear into a fog'' and be shelved after several rounds of reviews. He suggested the office of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder assume responsibility for managing water entitlements to return water to the environment, and state governments would deal with ''communities, irrigation and industry'' in a process that would replace the current system.
''I think the basin plan will become fairly irrelevant, if not completely irrelevant. It's hard to imagine it will be implemented because it's going to be locked up in endless litigation and political conflict. I think it will wither away.''
Dr Connell said under the federal Water Act, the basin plan required ''an unrealistic degree of co-operation'' from the states, with ''the Commonwealth dominating the process'' with an over-arching plan, and each state then required to produce a sub-plan for water allocations.
''We need a new system that makes it possible for people to get on and do things, and not be locked up in interminable meetings, shouting at each other over minor variations,'' he said.
South Australia's Labor Premier Jay Weatherill has confirmed his Government has sought legal advice on a High Court challenge to protect the state's constitutional rights. The draft plan lists the South Australia Riverland - one of Australia's biggest grape and citrus regions - as one of five areas to be hard hit by proposed water cuts of 2750 gigalitres a year across the basin.
Four basin states - Queensland, South Australia, NSW and Victoria - are vigorously opposed to the draft plan, but the ACT, which is exempt from the proposed water cuts, has welcomed it. A spokesman for ACT Water Minister Simon Corbell said it was not anticipated that either the Googong pipeline - which is licensed to pump 100 megalitres a day from the Murrumbidgee River - or the enlarged Cotter Dam project ''would be revised in the light of environmental watering targets or regulations to be applied to interception of river flows.''
Under the draft plan, the ACT will be required to prepare annual environmental water priorities, which could result in a 2 gigalitres cut to ACTEW's licence, from 70GL to 68GL. If this occurred , it was unlikely to result in tighter water restrictions for Canberra, and could easily be covered by existing water efficiencies, the spokesman said.
