We have a Murray-Darling basin plan but is it a plan for the future?

The Australian Parliament is poised to commit the nation to a Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Most will sigh with relief: no more bickering or book burning. It has been an exhausting process. Others will sigh with disappointment: the process was flawed; we could have achieved so much more. Still others will dismiss the Basin Plan as a fool's errand, as locking in failure.

The Water Act passed with bi-partisan support in 2007, was heralded as a new beginning: we would return the river to sustainability. With collaborative co-operation of the states, best science, and knowledge of the disastrous outcomes of past practice, we could forge a new future, a new relationship with the Murray-Darling Basin system.

Some of this has come to fruition. In its final form the Basin Plan reflects the work of many diverse groups, and many a compromise. South Australians are to be congratulated for finding common ground and turning the national spotlight on the needs of those at the end of the system. The two million tonnes of salt generated by the Murray-Darling system each year must be flushed out to sea through the Murray Mouth. It needs to be open.

The health of Lakes Alexandrina and Albert and the Coorong are our "canary down the mine". We have seen the disastrous consequences of low flows. Will the current plan deliver sufficient water? What happens if the Murray Mouth closes over again?

It's only one of many questions left unanswered by the final plan. Can we be confident that the current plan will deliver all that is promised, planned and asserted?

The plan does not click in until 2019. Between now and then we will have had further droughts, flooding rains, and who knows how many federal governments.

The plan fails to address in a scientifically rigorous manner the critical issues raised over and over again by scientists, Indigenous peoples, and community groups - climate change, over-allocation of ground water, real-time monitoring and capacity to respond.

The final plan is a compromise. It is a political solution, and it needs to be given that water is a state matter but what has been 'compromised'?

The discourse of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Minister for the Environment has consistently emphasised "balance". But in whose interests is this balance struck? At the table of competing interests who speaks for the environment?

In the "balance" that has been brokered, some parties had a stronger voice than others. The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists walked away from the Basin Plan because it is not supported by best science. The Environmental Defenders Office has critiqued the plan as inconsistent with the requirements of the Water Act.

But the Murray-Darling Basin Authority ploughed on. Those who would not "negotiate" were cast as unreasonable, ego-driven, naïve. Science was politicised.

Is this how we want to manage a system that crosses borders, that relies on connectivity? Have we allowed "might" to become "right"?

Rather than beginning with the proposition that garnered bipartisan support for the Water Act - that a healthy river is a precondition for healthy communities and economies - we have bought into the proposition that the economy must grow or we will become mired in a stagnant slough. But if we continue to over-exploit our limited water resources, we will not be able to grow at all. We will "all be rooned", as Hanrahan prophesied.

We have missed an opportunity. We could have begun the Basin Plan process with a big bold question, the audacious sort that Australians are rightly renowned for asking: "What kind of society will this plan service?". We would have needed to confront the relationship of the part to the whole, state to Commonwealth, urban to rural, traditional owners to settler population, family farm to corporate agribusiness.

We would have had to investigate our relationship to a mineral-rich but water-poor land. How are we to balance the present era of extractive exploitation against a future of dwindling access to clean water for future generations?

Our media could have played a critical role in setting out the scope and hope that a Basin Plan for a future Australia might have represented. Instead they focused on skirmishes and scaremongering.

In seeking a balance, I would have engaged a wider range of "experts" in a national conversation: social scientists alongside engineers; Indigenous storytellers, our poets, artists and songsters alongside policy wonks. Each would have addressed the nature of the society their work was building.

We should have had such a conversation. And with an eye to the long view, beyond the electoral cycle, beyond the mineral boom, to a society living in the land of droughts and flooding rains. Without such a conversation, I am left asking, is this a plan for our future?