Milked-dry: government meddling is the problem for milk industry, not the solution

Nowadays inflows from the Southern Ocean are stopped by 7.6 kilometers of barrage built by government in the 1930s. The barrages are immediately upstream of the Murray's mouth and Coorong, and join the islands at the southern end of Lake Alexandrina. These sea dykes have significantly reduced the capacity for natural scouring of the Murray's mouth by stopping the tides, and have made the lower lakes wholly dependent on freshwater from upstream.

Lake Alexandrina, once part of the Murray River's estuary, and about the size of Port Phillip Bay, is now essentially a vast carp-filled duck pond surrounded by new housing estates, golf courses and some farmland which all irrigate directly from this freshwater. This is where most of the "environmental flow", the water bought back from Victorian dairy farmers and me is being sent.

It's what the Basin plan, which is driving the water reform across Australia, mandates. This federal legislation, enacted when Malcolm Turnbull was Water Minister, gives priority to those wetlands covered by international agreements.

Indeed, it is people who live around Lake Alexandrina and who advocate that we buy Australian local dairy, that have been significant beneficiaries of the Basin plan because Lake Alexandrina has been awash with freshwater since the price of temporary water started to increase with the legislation of the Basin Plan. These South Australians vote for whoever is advocating more water for the Murray mouth, which essentially means more water for the Southern Ocean. "Better the ocean, than those greedy rice and cotton growers in New South Wales," I'm told.

It is true that voting preference in politically important South Australia may eventually put rice and cotton farmers out of business, but it's my bet that the export-dependent Victorian dairy industry will go first.

I was a rice grower and I am a cotton grower. We are not obliged to grow a crop every year. We can literally sit-on our hands when the price of water is too high. But dairy farmers, they need to milk and feed their cows every day.

Minister Joyce may have just today announced concessional loans to these dairy farmers, but it won't save them. It is unlikely that the Australian government will cause an increase in the price of milk but Minister Joyce could, however, do something about the Basin plan which is driving up input costs and increasing unreliability, which are making irrigated agricultural across the Murray Darling Basin unviable in the longer term.