Queensland water management: sold down the river

Rogue elements of Queensland's farming and fishing communities seem to have a fairly simple approach to natural resource management - use, grab or destroy as much of the resource as possible while tying the government up with an endless stream of demands for more and better consultation.

Down on the lower Balonne however, where Queensland's one-third share of the Murray Darling Basin slips into New South Wales, the strategy has come suddenly unstuck.

The Queensland government, staggered at the scale of a two year dam building orgy that threatens to completely derail attempts to cap water usage on the river, last month slapped a ban on the bulldozers knocking up dam walls all along the river.

Years of lax interpretations of lax laws has meant that in rural Queensland an outdoor dunny can need more planning permission than a 50,000 mL dam with walls no more than 4.99 metres high.

Around St George and Dirranbandi, cotton growers and water hoarders now have about 40,000 hectares of dams at best four metres deep in an area where the annual evaporation rate is about two metres a year.

More than half of this storage has been shoved up in the last two years in such a way that extensive leakage of the water resource is going to be as much a factor as massive evaporation.

Around a third of all the storage is on just one property, Cubbie station, with enough capacity to more than swallow up Sydney Harbour. Cubbie holds licences which mean that in a good year, even more water than this can be taken from the river, for the total payment to the State of just $3700 a year.

"Effectively, their water is free," said Queensland Natural Resources and Environment Minister, Mr Rod Welford.

For St George Irrigation Area cotton grower Ray Kidd the water is anything but free. He pays about $30,000 a year for his allocation of around 1000 mL from the government's Beardmore Dam, and pays even when the government can't supply the water.

Mr Kidd can be ploughing in his dead crop even when the dam that was built to supply him and other channel farmers is full to overflowing. It is not drought but favouritism bordering on corruption and staggering levels of incompetence that is to blame.

Beardmore Dam was a shallow storage developed in conjunction with the irrigation area. In 1979, the dam was considered "slightly over-committed" and this was before discovery of a "surveying error" which reduced the calculated capacity by about a fifth.

In the late 1980s, the dying National Party government began to entertain the bizarre notion of just giving away additional allocations of the "slightly over-committed" dam's water.