The government should call a water emergency in the Murray-Darling Basin, public policy experts say.
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ANU researcher Quentin Grafton says "rent-seeking" from special interest groups has led to the emergency.
In a paper with fellow researcher John Williams released last month, Professor Grafton also blames "regulatory capture" where decisions by bureaucrats favour particular interests.
He doubts the government would call an emergency but says by using the term drought, it was shifting blame on to the environment.
"If you use a different rhetoric ... then you change the whole nature of this. It says, well, first of all, there's a crisis," Prof Grafton told AAP.
"But it's not just a crisis in the context of a lack of rain, it says there's something else going on here.
"And the something else that is going on here is that successive water ministers and decisions by government have actually contributed to the situation that we're in now."
Prof Grafton pointed to the high representation irrigator lobbyists had with the NSW government, pointing to 25 meetings between 2014 to 2018, while non-industry groups only had one.
He said there had been mounting evidence since the Murray-Darling Basin Authority was established in 2007 that water infrastructure spending had not increased water flows.
Professor Grafton says the only logical explanation to explain such spending, despite no cost benefit analysis, was rent-seeking and regulatory capture.
"That is to say that there's a relatively small group of individuals or agencies or entities ... that have been able to influence decision-makers within state governments and Australian government to undertake these expenditures," Prof Grafton said.
He said during the Millennium Drought in the 2000s, then-prime minister John Howard put a number of options on the table.
This included a new Water Act, a national initiative by governments to improve water efficiency and the since-abolished National Water Commission.
Prof Grafton said not everything proposed then was successful but the government today was only proposing building new dams.
Australian Associated Press
