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

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?