Selling us down the river

Climate change and water management are in a woeful state in Australia.

Australia is more vulnerable to water shortage and the ravages of climate change than any other place on earth.

All too soon we will hand over this brown land to our children: they will pass the bundle to theirs. My prediction is coming generations will jump up and down on our graves if the country is handed over in its present state.

Last week, Australia was told, for the first time in a decade of subterfuge, that the privatisation of water is the aim, “moving forward”. The Australian government has chosen to side with  Canada, USA and the UK, the countries opposing Bolivia’s move to declare water a commons.

Twenty years of myopic mismanagement has permitted private global water lords to assume control over supply of water to Adelaide, Ballarat and Bendigo and has seen the handing over of billions to global companies to build desalination plants.

And just for some perspective: Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the girl in the top job, has made it clear that Australia will not support the Bolivian peoples’ battle to retain water supplies and services in the hands of the people. Now, we know.

Get onto the Centre for Public Integrity website and become familiar with the horrors of living with water privatisation.

It is an impossibility for a corporation to satisfy investors and provide inexpensive, reliable water services. Nowhere in the world has such a thing been achieved. "Simply put, the answer to the world’s water crisis rests on the principles of conservation, water justice and democracy. No global corporation that must be competitive to survive can act on these principles." Maude Barlow Blue Covenant.

Don't imagine for one second it can't happen in Australia. Directly across the ditch, New Zealanders are under siege. Local councils in Wellington are likely to be granted the right to sign up global water rats to provide water services and supplies.

Now dear readers - or those with shares in Vivendi and Veolia - the term “water rats” is justified. The CEO handling this in NZ, left South Australia to seal the deal. He is on record as saying. “We're not here because we've got bleeding hearts for Christ's sake. We're here to make money.” (Centre for Public Integrity “The Big Poo”.)

Water is the gossamer web that binds all life together. Water and climate are pivotal in the formula for a sustainable Australia. The driest inhabited continent on earth is also the most prone to dirty carbon habits, an addiction which has earned us top spot on the global list of highest polluters per capita.

The rest of the globe looks to Australia as the canary in the climate change mineshaft. We have already experienced significantly altered rainfall patterns, horrendous scorching fires, and dust storms that moved millions of tonnes of topsoil.

The country has been turned into a coal grabbing free-for-all. Thousands of coal seam gas bores pincushion the Murray Darling Basin, Liverpool Plains, huge areas of Western Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales. And Victoria boasts the world's dirtiest brown coal power station at Yallourn.

Coal and coal seam gas are just two of the greatest threats to our water resources. Coal is a double whammy. Water is lost and/or polluted when the stuff in mined, then water supplies are further stressed when coal is burned creating coal ash heaps which mix with rain and groundwater to pollute supplies. This pollution can even cause serious illnesses. All to make a few wealthy people even wealthier. The joke of coal royalties being a bonus and the jobs created being a plus is such shabby logic. (Newcastle University has produced comparative benefit studies on coal and alternative energy.)

Long-wall coal shearers are powering away in countless sites all over Australia destroying groundwater supplies and polluting standing watercourses. If the coal is where the groundwater is, then tough.

The Rudd sell-out on the issue of “the greatest moral challenge of our time” has left the Gillard government with a choice. Does Gillard opt for statesmanship? It appears we are about to get another 2020 show. A Citizen’s Assembly this time, lots of coloured pens, butcher’s paper and "drilling down". Most likely, key sessions will be "facilitated" by the forces of darkness raised and nurtured by the energy lobby. Half a day with these fellows and a stout-hearted, clear headed attendee will swear black is pink.

We just can't afford another squib. If we are “moving forward” right into the teeth of another flip flop, the consequences will be too ugly to contemplate.

Owing to a near total desertion on this front by the Australian media not too many Australians have the slightest idea why water and climate management are so critical.

In the vacuum of neglect the run has been made by self- interest. A triumph of spin: corporate fudge by the energy misinformation wizards.

More than one third of the world's water is now in the hands of massive water conglomerates. Last year the trade in global water was nearly 75 per cent the value of oil trade. Huge global corporates with annual turnovers ten times that of the GDP of many countries are after the world's water. This is done via the ruse of Private, Public Partnerships (PPPs) and a thousand other smoke and mirror means.

Big water boys already own a lot of Australia's water, mainly via foreign owned agri-businesses and deals with municipal authorities. They also have the controlling say in dozens and dozens of PPP's.

How has it come to this: bean counters pretending to know what they are doing about water management? How did they get water stewardship in the first place: a deranged fixation allowing everything to be determined by the global money market? When the bottom fell out of the market, the taxpayers bailed the ratters out.

Giving the pirates control over world water supplies (including Australia's in the next 18 months) is akin to leaving Jack the Ripper in charge of the autopsy. (See Global Access Partners Report: Exec Summary.)

Water: the new oil is a vital and valuable commodity. The disaster we see all around us, so often blamed on the drought, is a blind, blinkered determination to hijack water, for corporate exploitation.

This is a crime and a sell out as. It is as un-Australian as it gets. We are faced with no choice in the matter because both sides of the right wing modern day versions of the Labor and Liberal party think privatising water is a great idea.

There is zero public awareness; zero public discussion; and absolutely no effort by Labor or Liberal governments to begin to openly discuss this deception with the Australian public.

An urgent public discussion concerning water-as-a-human-right is pivotal if we are to shake the federal government out of its apparent state of denial on the dire state of water and its current mis-management in Australia

Maude Barlow, author, water activist, former Senior Water Adviser to the United Nations and patron of the independent group of groups, the Australian Water Network told attendees at the Australian Water Summit on April 1, 2009:

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change ... We can't do this anymore. Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assts, scientists are warning us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets.

American environmentalist Ernest Calabash calls them the four laws of ecology:

All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last.