Time to pay back the Snowy

In June 2006 John Howard saw the political and legal writing on the wall: the proposed Snowy Scheme sale was far from a “done deal”. Recapitulating on an otherwise clear determination to sell off the iconic Snowy the then Prime Minister set in motion a rapid withdrawal from the sale process which was closely followed by the states of Victoria and New South Wales.

There must have been something to hide because the NSW Finance Minister of the time was allegedly “shredding” documents before Greens MLC Sylvia Hale alerted the media.

The Snowy Scheme that had been under the hammer was suddenly back in the public domain with irrigators, environmentalists and towns breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Snowy Hydro was considered “safe” from a repeat attack by privateers who once anticipated a strong positioning of this key utility as the monopoly provider of peak demand energy in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

However, since June 2006, The Snowy Scheme has sustained repeated attacks from the same privateers: the Snowy Hydro CEO and by association, complicit NSW Government Ministers. Three, four or more times the Snowy CEO has talked up another IPO (initial public offering) and has most recently, engaged a private consultative group - some of its personnel with links to Halliburton - to “massage” the Snowy Mountains community towards another sales pitch for Snowy Hydro. Targeted editorials in the local media since June 2006 and more recently, glossy brochures and a glossier DVD pleading the case to “grow” the asset in order to “remain relevant” in the NEM, is the determined public relations agenda of the Snowy CEO and collaborators.

Indeed, a considered corporatisation-privatisation pathway was engineered on the back of a promise not to sell the Snowy Scheme clearly pre-dating the first IPO for Snowy Hydro Limited that dates back to the evolution of the National Electricity Market.

Governments may have short memories but people clearly do not. Before corporatisation of the Snowy was at all possible, governments had to promise a “no sale” position. Local communities connected to the Snowy River gathered together in Dalgety ready for a constitutional challenge to drive home the point that the Snowy was not for sale and to ensure that the water was returned to their river. Never before had Section 100 of the Australian Constitution been tested in the High Court and it remains untested despite the increasing commercial demands for water.

Worried that corporatisation would not be achieved, governments committed to both a no sale of the Snowy Scheme position and to water - with real environmental flows for the Snowy River. But the Snowy River today boasts no more than 4 per cent of natural flow below the Jindabyne Dam with little environmental water having been returned despite the clear, legal targets. There have been endless excuses by the NSW Government and Snowy Hydro using, mostly, the drought as the reason not to return water to the Snowy.

The second “lie” after the “no sale despite corporatisation” promise, according to many locals, was the high profile decommissioning of the Mowamba Aqueduct followed by a stealthy, yet highly visible, recommissioning of the Aqueduct. Now, Snowy Hydro pumps valuable “natural flows” from the Moonbah River that forms a de facto headwater to the Snowy River, straight back into Lake Jindabyne. The visual evidence is both insulting and pathetic with a piddling stream of water poking through the stone “coffer dam” wall that the NSW Government has yet to remove to enable ecologically sensitive water to flow out of Lake Jindabyne into the upper Snowy River.

To top off the apparent deceit is the patent failure of the three “shareholder” governments of Snowy Hydro to establish the legislated Snowy Scientific Committee charged with key decisions concerning the environmental health of the Snowy River that would certainly impact on “transfers” of water out of the Snowy Scheme.

During the drought Adaminaby and Jindabyne people witnessed massive drops in the major Snowy Scheme storages of Eucumbene and Jindabyne that exposed the once drowned towns and land sacrificed by farmers to the great Snowy Scheme. These rapid and alarming falls in lake levels were at first deeply concerning then cause for significant doubts in the governance of the Snowy Water Licence. The loss of so much water was a clear break from the tradition of retaining drought storages. The forward “sales” of the timing of water release from the Snowy Scheme along with retention of water for hydro generation in the Talbingo-Jounama system meant that money was still flowing into the NSW Government and Snowy Hydro coffers, but at what opportunity cost to local communities, their tourism and farming income, their domestic water supplies and to the dying Snowy River?

Compounding the stresses on storages and outflows into the Upper Murrumbidgee and Snowy Rivers, was over allocation of licences in the Murray Darling, over extraction, the growth of the cotton industry in Queensland and subsequent diminishing of water from the Warrego into the Murray Darling system.

Later, the evidence of illegal dams and levees came to light impacting on key wetlands drained and starved of water for farming along with significant ecological damage in the Coorong Lakes, especially Lake Albert a few megalitres away from the acid sulphate substrate soils spitting sulphuric acid to the surface. Similarly, the mouth of the Snowy River at Marlo suffers from the lack of annual snowmelt flushing flows affecting habit for the breeding populations of Australian Bass.

Then came the tax-avoidance managed investment schemes (MIS) forging deep rooted pine plantations into the Upper Murray catchments between Tumbarrumba and Tumut to supply the lucrative packaging cartels with an endless supply of uniform raw material. Anecdotal evidence placed deep culverts ploughed to three metres to capture all rainwater and runoff before vital stream flows reached the upper Tumut and Murray Rivers. Streams that had never dried up - even in the worst of droughts early last century - dried up with, allegedly, the advent of the MIS placing further stress on the Snowy River to supply water to the Murray.

To accentuate the emerging water problems was the separation of water and property rights, the privatisation-by-stealth agenda that saw water commodified instead of remaining as the “commons”, a public natural resource to which all Australians, the environment and irrigators had “reasonable rights”.

Enter the global water barons - the big companies such as Vivendi, Veolia and Macquarie Water. Enter “eWater” lauded by the then Commonwealth Government and Minister for Water with never a mention of the privatisation agenda. The primary phase of “public-private partnerships” is launched and water privatisation is set in motion without a whisper from the press.

From the perspective of the Snowy River, environmental flows are suddenly in never-never land with extreme stresses on the Murray and no real water for the Snowy or for its dying fish population at the mouth that have failed to breed for more than 18 years. The rationale to return environmental flows into the Snowy River - to first find savings in the west - is clearly flawed with massive over extraction from the Snowy to supply the Murray and with the incoming Prime Minister declaring that he simply does not have a silver bullet solution to short-term environmental flows. Nowhere, is there any mention of rolling back cotton and rice production.

By virtue of the major blocks, the Jindabyne Dam Wall, the coffer dam that needs removing and the Mowamba Aqueduct forcing the Moonbah River backwards instead of allowing it to form a temporary natural headwater for the Snowy, the Snowy River immediately below the Jindabyne Dam enjoys little more than 4 per cent natural flows, far less than the Murray.

But there is welcome news. The Federal Minister for Water, Senator Penny Wong, will now control the extractive cap for the Murray Darling. Equally welcome is the decision to establish an independent Statutory Authority to govern the Murray Darling Basin.

On the back of COAG and the new Murray Darling Plan Federal Member for Eden-Monaro Mike Kelly announced the formation of the Snowy Community Advisory Committee to advise him on the future of the Snowy Scheme, the return of environmental flows to the rivers and cloud seeding. The original plan for the Committee was indeed a seat at the table of the Water Administration Corporation and Water Consultation and Liaison Committee established under the Snowy Water Inquiry Outcomes Implementation Deed to which government must comply.

This committee in its genesis also planned to liaise properly with the Murray Darling Reference Group and MD Community Advisory Committee to co-determine water allocations. Key to community involvement is real status including the power to appoint members to the Snowy Hydro Board and clear decision making role and powers. This would, by definition, mean a vote in the timing of water releases from the Snowy Scheme and to whom - whether for irrigation or environmental flows - as well as the retention of drought storages in the Snowy Scheme. At present, these decisions are made behind closed doors with little or no public scrutiny.

This is not the outcome delivered by the Member for Eden-Monaro who sees the SCAC as simply an advisory group with a Labor Party member as the Chair.

The rivers have the right to advocacy. Whether government is able to deliver on legislated targets and whether science and commonsense can prevail over politics, corporate influence and money remains to be seen.

The challenge now is for the Federal Minister for Water to consider extractive caps for all rivers - especially for the Snowy - and change otherwise unfair agreements that demand water savings from one river system before another river system is allowed reasonable environmental flows. The challenge is also to contain corporate purchases of water and the privatisation train that is moving full steam ahead.

The question is whether the Halliburton group, or any other corporation, has at any time attempted to buy Australia's water and sequester that water for its private use, especially so during the drought and whether some of the big corporate water buyers upstream will have caps placed on their water use.

Water for agriculture - for the national food bowl - does not equate to water for corporate profits and especially when those profits do not stay in Australia. Water for sustainable agriculture - for a sustainable Australian population - is entirely separate to corporate water, for MIS or for any businesses that indeed enjoys lobbying power that neither the rivers, wetlands or estuaries, domestic users, or small family farms could ever imagine.

Businesses that donate to political parties should not have any influence over water allocations and that includes MIS or other politically aligned or influential agribusinesses.

People may be forgiving but they are not stupid. We own the water.

Scrutiny and auditing of public water is imperative and this must include state theft of public water for “sales”. Water is public property yet the state sees fit to appropriate and sell that water.

Now, with 14 water areas in NSW alone it is likely the NSW Government will attempt to corporatise and sell off municipal or community-owned water utilities to companies such as Veolia who, potentially, will own both the utility and water as they will undoubtedly achieve in Bangladesh.

As far as the pivotal Snowy Scheme is concerned, Snowy Hydro exists in the grey world hiding between the ASIC monitored real business sector and politically accountable government.

The Snowy Scheme would better serve its essential role as a Statutory Authority, similar to the proposed MDB Statutory Authority, with the appointment of a Public Water Administrator - free from political or pecuniary interests - to manage and apportion precious water resources including for environmental flows to the Snowy River.

It is time to pay back the Snowy River. It is time for the Snowy Scheme to be managed judiciously in the public interest - not in the interest of expanding an energy empire and “insurance derivatives business” as is the current perception of the Snowy CEO and Government collaborators.

It is time to allow the Snowy River to flow and this must mean powerful flushing flows this coming spring: flows that will deliver life all the way to the mouth of the great river. It is time also for flushing flows along the course of the Murray River.

This spring, let us demonstrate that indeed, we have both understanding and respect for natural systems and let the rivers run for once, wild and free as far as possible with extraction only for domestic use, for stock and for essential plantings to feed the nation. May the Federal Minister for Water stand up to corporate interests and place a definite cap on extraction of water from publicly owned rivers, wetlands and estuaries.

From the source - from the Snowy Mountains - the great rivers the Snowy and Murray have a destiny that must be fulfilled without undue interference from the profiteers and privateers, whether government or corporate interests.