Queensland water management: sold down the river

Local member and Water Resources Minister Don Neal seems to have revealed the real game in a letter to his electorate council chairperson, Mrs Pat Bonthrone, saying that "the value of a new 470 mL allocation is probably at least $70,000 and possibly as high as $230,000".

This may have been of some interest to Mrs Bonthrone, whose property, which despite being almost impractically upstream of the dam wall, was now fortuitously included within the newly drawn boundaries for the proposed water giveaway.

Throwing consistency completely to the wind, Mr Neal then informed Mrs Bonthrone of his plans to also auction off some entitlements to dam water, saying that "there are many reasons for not continuing to hand out allocations free of charge".

The extent of the insanity is fairly clear in the figures - the government gave away an estimated 15,000 mL of water to the owners of river properties up to 70 kilometres downstream and auctioned off 3000 mL.

The graziers down - or up - the river just happened to be the strongest supporters of the National Party. The buyers at the auction were irrigation area farmers trying to top up their existing allocation on the basis that 70 percent of a larger amount might end up being as much as 100 percent of an existing allocation that could no longer be guaranteed.

In reality, the situation was much worse. To deliver an allocation at a farm gate 70 kilometres downstream, up to six times the allocation has to be held in the storage to allow for delivery losses. In one case, the department released 400 mL through the dam in order to deliver a 100 mL order to a farmer only halfway down the Balonne. Only 4 mL turned up at the intake of the farmer's pump.

In total therefore, the government for its own political reasons ended up allocating nearly 50 percent more water from a dam stretched to capacity. This was not done unknowingly - it has since been discovered that a Sydney resource economist was commissioned to work out how much extra water could be taken from the dam.

Mr Jim Irish determined that the department might get an extra three percent of water from the dam, but would need to compensate the channel farmers for a reduction in the reliability of their supply. The report was well buried, like a number of other reports on management of the St George Irrigation Area.

The election of a Labor government seems to have done little to stop the policy insanity at St George. From 1992-93, the department decided to allow the river farmers to "park" their free allocations in the dam, further dramatically reducing its capacity. Once again, the figures speak for themselves. Initially, with the dam and irrigation area in fine balance enough water could be supplied for a full crop in more than 90 percent of years.

The great water giveaway and the free parking policy now mean that the scheme now supplies enough water for a full crop in just over a third of years.

However, the river farmers have done very well out of the scheme - they could sell their properties at very attractive prices to channel irrigators seeking access to water and they could sell water to channel irrigators. Often the water they sold was water parked in the dam, thereby reducing its capacity to supply the channel farmer who had paid for an allocation.

Not surprisingly, St George became a community divided and the issue has been a long running political sore. A succession of ministers have promised to solve the issue by promising to build additional public storage and the new dam at St George has been announced almost as often as the Redcliffe railway.